Peter Stagg dot com - the blog » fstab http://www.peterstagg.com Cumulus humilis & cirrus musings: ponderings in the cloud… Sun, 20 Nov 2011 11:27:24 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Pay no attention to the file behind the curtain http://www.peterstagg.com/2010/05/pay-no-attention-to-the-file-behind-the-curtain/ http://www.peterstagg.com/2010/05/pay-no-attention-to-the-file-behind-the-curtain/#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 23:52:01 +0000 pstagg http://www.peterstagg.com/?p=669 When I recently tried to get NTFS working on my 10.6.3 server I came across this post about activating native NFS support in Snow Leopard. Sufficed to say, being a bear of little brain, I did not get it working. It did, however, lead me to a curiosity. The article instructs us to edit the file /etc/fstab which you may or may not have, in which case you should create it. I didn’t have that file but I did find a file called fstab.hd in the same location. I though this may be the file I needed edit so I opened it up and found the following inside:

IGNORE THIS FILE.
This file does nothing, contains no useful data, and might go away in
future releases.  Do not depend on this file or its contents.

Now I’m not the sort of hacker that would take this any further so I still don’t know what this file, that may or may not do something, that may or may not be around in the future, actually does. I bet, it does do something, otherwise why would it exist and not be relied upon. Or am I just paranoid (yes, but besides that). Apple should really know better. This is a red rag to a bull…, an elephant in the room…, a platitude warped in metaphor, bound up with a simile… to a hacker. You can’t ignore a file that say IGNORE THIS FILE. It’s going to worry me for days now.

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