Overlayroot consider not to mount in /media

[Nehemiah of Zebulun]

We are using overlayroot in combination with NBD, booting our Ubuntu Bionic workstations over the network. One thing we noticed is that the 'root-ro' mount becomes available to the end user as a mounted volume in Nemo file manager. I adjusted the overlayroot package to mount in '/mnt' which changed that behavior. I'm not sure if '/mnt' should be the location to mount but it would certainly be worth considering mounting in another location than '/media'.

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

Per FHS [1] I think /media is correct.
- /mnt/ : Temporarily mounted filesystems
- /media/ : Mount points for removable media such as CD-ROMs (appeared in FHS-2.3)

It isn't really temporary as it has to stay for the runtime of the system.
OTOH it isn't a removable media either.

I'll wait what Scott thinks about it - I think he is subscribed but I'll add him explicitly.

Might I ask you to outline the actual pain points you see due to this, I have some ideas but wonder what it is for you:
- that users wonder what "this thing" in the Nemo file manager is?
- that they get old data on the -ro mount as it is before the overlay?
- ...?

[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/FilesystemHierarchyStandard

[Nehemiah of Zebulun (nehemiah-zb)]

The pain point is mainly that it confuses the end user. The size of the NBD mount, in my case is typically very close to that of a USB thumb drive. I can of course train my users to ignore it all together but I like to keep it as friendly as possible.

One idea I just had is to try mounting in hidden folders. I would be willing to try and mount in '/media/.root-ro' and report back with what result that gives.