Mounting inside mounted read-only volume

Question

I have mounted nfs volume in my /etc/fstab as

nfshost.com:/path/dir  /mount/point  nfs     rw,sync,hard,intr       0       0

I'd like to mount another nfs volume

nfshost.com:/completely/different/path  /mount/point/subdirectory  nfs     rw,sync,hard,intr       0       0

However, it doesn't seem to work, I get the error message

mount.nfs: mount point /mount/point/subdirectory does not exist

I also can't mount it manually with sudo mount nfshost.com:/completely/different/path /mount/point/subdirectory. Mounting it anywhere else, e.g. sudo mount nfshost.com:/completely/different/path /tmp/test works.

I suspect that the problems are that I neither have write access to the originally mounted /path/dir, nor does it have the subdirectory to which I'd mount the other volume. Creating the directory structure /mount/point/subdirectory locally, mounting first into subdirectory then into mount/point works, but then mount/point contains the mounted volume and I can't access subdirectory.

ls /mount/point/subdirectory
ls: cannot access '/mount/point/subdirectory': No such file or directory

Is there a way to mount these volumes to achieve this directory structure?

Answer 1

You need to create the directory first.

mount doesn't create a mount point if it doesn't exist. That's why it's telling you mount point /mount/point/subdirectory does not exist

Try:

sudo mkdir /mount/point/subdirectory
sudo mount nfshost.com:/completely/different/path /mount/point/subdirectory

If you don't have write access to /mount/point/ then you can't create a directory in it. You'll have to mount the second directory somewhere else.