Mounting Network Folders Resiliently in Linux

Network Drives, Linux, and You

We have all done it: mount /dev/vdb1 /mnt/my_net_drive. Easy, right? Type and forget. No no no, what about reboots? What about outages? What about permissions? Fstab will save us, sutrely? Again, no no no. But, Chris, you say, why are you preaching at me? I made that mistake, a network outage and a Kubernetes cluster fallover made me think I had lost nearly 1TB of imported images and backups.

I go to /mnt/my_net_drive and see emptiness. I check fstab and reboot but nothing. No worries, I think, I will just reimport the data… Except those data are gone now, backed up onto a different network folder with the same issue…

Fstab has been my go to for years and I have not really had to worry about production in the real sense of the word. This situation was dangerously close to a real production issue and I had zero time. This is where systemd and automount saved my bacon.

Creating a Network Mount in Systemd

Here, we need 2 things:

1. The mount itself
2. The automounting service

The Mount

Just look at that syntax, beautiful, is it not? So simple.

[Unit]
Description=Data Dir on Network

[Mount]
What=/dev/vdb1
Where=/mnt/my_net_drive
Type=ext4
Options=defaults

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Create this file in /etc/systemd/system/mnt-my_net_drive.mount (using the path of the mount as the file name)

The Automounting Service

[Unit]
Description=Automount Data Dir
Requires=network-online.target
After=network-online.service

[Automount]
Where=/mnt/my_net_drive

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

This file is saved in /etc/systemd/system/mnt-my_net_drive.automount

Mounts Away!

First, make sure you remove your fstab entries and unmount your drive(s). Now, all you need to do is systemctl daemon-reload and systemctl enable mnt-my_net_drive.automount, followed by systemctl start mnt-my_net_drive.automount.

Boom, done. Check your drive is there and your files are there. Now this drive will be resilient to network outages and will remount when the network comes back up.