Why is a drive mounted already at /mnt ? Is this ok?

Question

One of my drives is mounted directly as /mnt

$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda1            7.9G  6.9G  597M  93% /
udev                  829M  4.0K  829M   1% /dev
tmpfs                 334M  160K  334M   1% /run
none                  5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none                  834M     0  834M   0% /run/shm
/dev/xvda2            147G  188M  140G   1% /mnt           <--- This one

I thought /mnt is only the "parent mount points", and that devices are usually mounted as /mnt/something and not as /mnt itself.

/mnt seems to be working ... I can write to it. Is this situation ok?

(This is an Amazon EC2 ubuntu image)

Answer 1

There's nothing special about the /mnt directory. You can mount something directly there if that's practical for you, or choose to mount in subdirectories (or both).
You could also mount things to /foo (or anything else really) if that makes sense for your applications/use-case.

Just don't mount over directories that contain important (system or application/user) files - they'd become hidden by that mount, as so mostly unreachable until it is unmounted.

Answer 2

Just to add to Mat's answer is that you could take a look at the fstab file that should be around /etc and change there the mounting point for that drive.