[gpfsug-discuss] Mounting filesystem on top of an existing filesystem

[Jonathan Buzzard]

On 19/11/2020 18:13, Caubet Serrabou Marc (PSI) wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> 
> thanks a lot for your comments. Agreed, I better avoid it for now. I was 
> concerned about how GPFS would behave in such case. For production I 
> will take the safe route, but, just out of curiosity, I'll give it a try 
> on a couple of test filesystems.
> 

Don't use symlinks there is a range of applications that will break and 
you will confuse the hell out of your users as the fact you are not 
under /projects/new but /random/new is not hidden.

Besides which if the symlink goes away because /projects goes away then 
it is all a bust anyway.

If you are worried about /projects going away then the best plan is to 
mount the GPFS file systems somewhere else and then bind mount the 
directories into /projects on all the machines where they are mounted.

GPFS is quite happy with this. We bind mount /gpfs/users into /users and 
/gpfs/software into /opt/software by default. In the past I have bind 
mounted random paths for every user (hundred plus) into /home


JAB.

-- 
Jonathan A. Buzzard                         Tel: +44141-5483420
HPC System Administrator, ARCHIE-WeSt.
University of Strathclyde, John Anderson Building, Glasgow. G4 0NG