vsta mount tutorial

Can someone give a short tutorial of how mounting works in vsta. I
either don't understand it correctly, or I've got some misconceptions.

First, I was under the impression that it was possible to mount a
filesystem on top of a directory and still be able to see the existing
directory (stackable or translucent filesystems). I haven't been able
to figure out how to do this.

Second, I've created a large file in the / directory on a dos
filesystem with the mkfs_vfs program, and then run a vstafs server
using it as the datastore. This works fine and I can mount it and
use it (way cool!). I mounted it as /v and copied /vsta to /v.
Then I tried mounting the vstafs filesystem on /vsta. That worked.
So then I removed everything from the /vsta directory on the dos
partition that wasn't needed for booting, and changed the inittab
and fstab files to automatically start the vstafs and mount it on
/vsta.

After rebooting, things seemed okay, except that some things quit
working properly. ps started giving weird results in the USR/SYS
column, and vi and less started complaining about the terminal type
not being found. Basically, it appered that for certain operations,
the /vsta directory on the dos filesystem was being searched, and not
the /vsta filesystem being served by the vstafs server.

Any help in clearing up my understanding of this would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks.

Brett McCoy, UNIX Systems Administrator
Computing and Network Services
Kansas State University, Manhattan KS 66506
vox: (913) 532-4908 / fax: (913) 532-5914 / e-mail: brtmac@ksu.ksu.edu
Received on Mon Nov 28 14:20:10 1994