'k, I seem to recall this one being brought up before, but hadn't saved that thread :( I've re-read through the mount_unionfs man page to make sure that I hadn't missed anything, so ... I'm trying to narrow down where the issue with the file system hang is coming in, and in doing so, I just did a mount_unionfs of the file system, cd'd to the usr/bin directory and ran './bzip2' ... it worked fine ... but, when I run it a second time, I ge a 'Permission denied' error ... The reason, of course, is that the bzip2 binary has 'moved up' a layer, and consequently had its bits changed to 644 instead of 755 ... Now, if I recall the original thread, the comment was to change the mount point to noatime, so that, of course, running a binary doesn't cause the access time to be updated ... But, this wasn't an issue in 4.x ... has unionfs changed that much since 4.x, or should this be considered a bug? If not considered a bug, what impact is there of setting the unionfs to noatime? Will this affect files that aren't on the unionfs? for instance, if I 'vi /usr/bin/testfile', and then did a more of it at a later point, will the access time be updated? Basically, does this only affect the file system that has been union'd onto the "bottom" of the file system, or does it affect everything, both the top and bottom layer? Thanks ... ---- Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org) Email: scrappy@hub.org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664