I will be training a new member of our team as I commit to do so before I leave :)

Our work are mostly on filesystem so I need to start there.

What is a filesystem and what is a mount point? Most people are confused with these two so I will explain here based on how I understand it.

A filesystem is basically the repository for all your files and as RedHat said that a filesystem is a disk drive by itself provides a place to store data, and nothing more.

To be able to access any filesystem you need mount it to make is available to the system. In order to do these you need a device file representing the desired disk and partition and a directory under which the mounted filesytem will be made available and that directory is known as the mount point.

When a filesystem is mounted, that filesystem is made available as a set of subdirectories under the specified mount point.

for example on a system we have a directory named unix and the full path would be /unix and assume that there is a filesystem to be mounted to that directory. If that filesystem had a file in it called sample.txt and you mount the filesystem to /unix, in that case,  you can access the file with the below full file specification.

/unix/sample.txt

If in you change the mount point of the filesystem to /linux the full file specification would be

/linux/sample.txt

To see what is mounted you can view /etc/mtab and /proc/mounts on Linux and /etc/mnttab on HP-UX, you can also use df command and bdf command for HP-UX.

While /etc/fstab is used to control what systems are mounted when the system boots, as well as to supply default values for other file systems that may be mounted manually from time to time.

This is it for now, we’ll continue on LVM