Where should I mount my internal drive partitions?
As far as I searched on the internet, I came to know that
/Media = mount point for removable media that system do it itself ( usb drive , CD )
/Mnt = temporarily mounting anything manually
I can most probably mount anything wherever I want, but if that’s the case what’s the point of /mnt? Just to be organised I suppose.
TLDR
If /mnt is for temporary and /media is for removable where should permanent non-removable devices/partitions be mounted. i.e. an internal HDD which is formatted as NTFS but needs to be automounted at startup?
Asking with the sole reason to know that, what’s the practice of user who know Linux well, unlike me.
I know this is a silly question but I asked anyway.
chmod 000
What does this do? I’m a Meganoob.
Fixed mountpoints
?
having one available manual mountpoint
you mean the whole /mnt is meant to single mount point?
Sorry for all the questions.
Adding to what the other comment explained:
I use chown 000 so that regular users fail to access a directory when no filesystem is mounted on it; in practice it never happens, because “regular users” = { me }, but I like being pedantic.
As for /mnt, it is supposed to be a single temp. mountpoint, but I use it as the parent directory of multiple mountpoints some of which are just for temporary use.
I use
chown 000so that regular users fail to access a directory when no filesystem is mounted on it
My dummy brain can’t understand it man.
Isn’t someone can’t access a directory when no filesystem is mounted on it the default behaviour?
No, directories without anything mounted on them are normal directories - which checks out, since you can mount anything anywhere; unlike Windows volume letters, which only exist when volumes are mounted or detected by the OS.
When you mount a filesystem onto a directory, the OS “replaces” its contents AND permissions with that of the filesystem’s root.
Here’s an example with my setup (hopefully you’re somewhat familiar with Bash and the output of ls -l).
Imagine some random filesystem in /dev/sda1 owned by “user” which only contains a file named “/Hello World.txt”:
$ # List permissions of files in /mnt:
$ # note that none of the directories have read, write nor execute permissions
$ ls -la /mnt
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 168 May 31 23:13 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 128 May 31 23:14 ..
d--------- 1 root root 0 Aug 1 2020 a/
d--------- 1 root root 0 Feb 11 2022 b/
d--------- 1 root root 0 Aug 11 2021 vdisks/
$ # No read permission on a directory => directory entries cannot be listed
$ ls /mnt/a
cannot open directory '/mnt/a': Permission denied
$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/a
$ # List again the permissions in /mnt: the root of /dev/sda1
$ # has rwxr-xr-x (or 755) permissions, which override the 000 of /mnt/a ...
$ ls -la /mnt
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 168 May 31 23:13 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 128 May 31 23:14 ..
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Aug 1 2020 a/
d--------- 1 root root 0 Feb 11 2022 b/
d--------- 1 root root 0 Aug 11 2021 vdisks/
$ # ... and its contents can be accessed by the mounted filesystem's owner:
$ ls -la /mnt/a
drwxr-xr-x 1 user user 168 May 31 23:13 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 168 May 31 23:13 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 0 Jul 4 22:13 'Hello World.txt'
$ find /mnt
/mnt
/mnt/a
/mnt/a/Hello World.txt
find: ‘/mnt/b Permission denied
find: ‘/mnt/vdisks’: Permission denied
Please note that me setting permissions is just extreme pedantry, it’s not necessary at all and barely changes anything and if you’re still getting familiar with how the Linux VFS and its permissions work you can just ignore all of this.
