in particular the definition of "authority" found in the Appendix of RFC 3986.) According to those standards, no host specification will ever contain a '/' character. As a result, it is sufficient to scan a provided "device" from an /etc/fstab entry for the first '/' character, and if it's found, treat that as the beginning of the path. If no '/' character is present, we can treat the entire string as the monitor host specification(s), and assume the path to be the root of the name space. We'll still require a ':' to separate the host portion from the (possibly empty) path portion. This means that we can more formally define how ceph will interpret the "device" it's provided when processing a mount request: "device" will look like: [,...]:[] where is [:] is optional, but if present must begin with '/' This addresses http://tracker.newdream.net/issues/2919 Signed-off-by: Alex Elder Reviewed-by: Dan Mick Q82x