The Path to Zen

Watch out when you move /var in Ubuntu

When I was installing my Ubuntu, there was this part where an experienced admin would spend some time devising a plan for which part of file system should be mounted from which partition. I decided to skip it and kept everything except /home on one single partition - just to keep it simple. Well, at an unfortunate moment during the past weekend, it suddenly hit me that I should stop being such a noob, and “make things proper”.

So I fired up gparted and broke a fat32 partition into a few ext3 ones. Reboot… enter single user mode… move /opt, /tmp, and /var into their respective parition… edit /etc/fstab… reboot. Voila! df confirms exactly what I had planned for, except…

Except the networking is completely down - “completely” as in “even the loopback 127.0.0.1 interface isn’t up”.

Rebooting with “nosplash” showed some peculiar messages:

Mount point “/var/run” does not exist. Skip mounting.
Mount point “/var/lock” does not exist. Skip mounting.
(and later)
/var/run/network does not exist…

After a bit googling, I ran into Chris Siebenmann’s wiki page on how Ubuntu requires /var/run to stay on the root file system even though /var is relocated to somewhere else. Among his comments, I found this particular sentence amusingly depressing (well at the moment it was just “depressing”):

If you started out without a separate /var filesystem and now want to move to one, apparently your life just sucks.

Eventually I fixed the problem by entering the single user mode, umounting /var, and manually creating /var/run and /var/lock in the root file system.