Issue creating (retaining!) link in filesystem

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Have my Vivaldi setup so the user directory is a link to a directory in a different location (outside the Home directory.)
This generally works fine, and will work for a day/2 days/a week/almost a month, but intermittently, the link disappears, and the user directory within the Vivaldi structure, becomes a normal directory.
If I then go in, delete the normal directory, and recreate the link ([FONT=arial]ln -s /home/data/_data/Vivaldi/John/ /home/johno/.config/vivaldi/John), things will then work as expected, until a while down the track, the same thing happens again…
Any ideas why the link is intermittently disappearing?
Thanks.

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2

Hi
What is the filesystems involved? Unusual to use /home as a mount point, how is this being mounted, user login, fstab etc? I have a /data partition with symlinks to ~/.config and see no issues.

3

/ is BTRFS, home is ext4, data is ntfs (needs ‘occasionally’ to be read from Win…). All being loaded from fstab
Was wondering if it is an availability thing at boot (ie what loads fiirst…)

From fstab:

.... /                       btrfs  defaults                      0  0
.... /home                   ext4   data=ordered                  0  2
.... /home/data              ntfs   defaults           0  0

Mount commands have generally developed from usage over the years, that seemed to work… :shame:

Thanks.

4

Hi
Is the ntfs actually ntfs-3g? I suspect it’s needs some mount options, perhaps not cleanly unmounting or usr/group options need adding.

Can you show the output from the mount command for the ntfs partition.

5

Looks like it. Wheatever is default with Tumbleweed. See below…

Output from journalctl when mounting:

Mar 09 12:04:43 boss sudo[7859]:     john : TTY=pts/1 ; PWD=/home/johno ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/mount -v /home/data/
Mar 09 12:04:43 boss sudo[7859]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session opened for user root
Mar 09 12:04:43 boss ntfs-3g[7863]: Version 2021.8.22 external FUSE 29
Mar 09 12:04:43 boss ntfs-3g[7863]: Mounted /dev/sdb2 (Read-Write, label "Data", NTFS 3.1)
Mar 09 12:04:43 boss ntfs-3g[7863]: Cmdline options: rw
Mar 09 12:04:43 boss ntfs-3g[7863]: Mount options: allow_other,nonempty,relatime,rw,fsname=/dev/sdb2,blkdev,blksize=4096
Mar 09 12:04:43 boss ntfs-3g[7863]: Ownership and permissions disabled, configuration type 7
Mar 09 12:04:43 boss sudo[7859]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session closed for user root

Thanks.

6

Hi
So, I’m assuming you boot into widows at times? Does the symlink go foobar after this? If not when it does go foobar is there anything in the output from journalctl about the mount?

7

Hi
This may also be worth a read: https://jp-andre.pagesperso-orange.fr/junctions.html#symlinks

8

Yes, but haven’t in months, so not sure about the result of that… not sure about journalctl output.
Thanks

9

This is reproducible (in the long term) behavior of UNIX systems since ever. I have seen this first with Apollo Domain and HP-UX workstations in the early nineties. Applications fail to correctly check for the target of the link to exist and prematurely create a folder with the same name replacing the link. I have no idea what vivaldi actually does on invocation.

A more annoying variation of the above is system administrators running backups without checking for the correct backup mount. This reproducibly resulted in 100% usage of the system partition and warranted a really long coffee break.