OT: redhat

[Bill Vermillion]

On Fri, Nov 05 09:32 , while denying his reply is spam, Bill Campbell 
prattled on endlessly saying: 

> On Thu, Nov 04, 2004, Bill Vermillion wrote:
> >press any key to reboot  -oops- Fairlight said on Thu, Nov 04 18:22  
> ....
> ...
> >The problem with /var being the mount for spool on anything other
> >than a smaller business system is you will rapidly run out of 
> >room in a default install.

> >I symlilk /var/spool/mail to /usr/mail.

> We switched to Maildir mail storage a couple of years ago, and
> this problem goes away as each user's mailbox is in their $HOME
> directory. This also makes it trivial to maintain user quotas
> that include their mail storage.

Since none of the mail users has a true home directory everything
is kept in one place.  I think there are 4 people that have the
ability to put things in home.

> >This AM a client with one mail account that gets copies of EVERY
> >mail to anyone at their company called and said he couldn't get any
> >mail.
> >
> >I watched and the problem was that by the time the file was copied
> >to the .xxx.pop file for tranmission his MS device had timed out.
> >Normally that all-in-one account was accessed once each week
> >and archived to DVD.   But it grew large and this AM when he 
> >called and I watched it was at about 950MB.  I just checked a
> >moment ago and it was 1.015GB.   So when I get it split and he gets
> >it in place, his archiving will now become twice a week.

> >If you are wondering why the file is so large, it is for an
> >invesigatory firm and there are large documents, still photographs,
> >and video files.    That and on other place are while the mail
> >limits are so large - 50MB per mail message :-).  

> An even better argument for Maildir as each message is in a
> separate file which eliminates file locking problems as well as
> the issues of rewriting huge BSD mail files.

That could be a killer in some circumstances.  For instance if
each mail message were a separate file in a directory that would
bring this particular directory to have over 18,000 entries.
And that could also slow things down.

These clients are far from what you'd normally see as are those who
use other services.   One site is a pure document submission,
approval distribution site - and they moves to 'the world's
smallest ISP' because we could do things that others couldn't or
wouldn't so they moved their sites from Verio.

Another  - related in the same technical area - but not affiliated
has hundreds of files in the 50 to 500MB size. But that is
the site of AAF - Advanced Authoring Format - for professional
digital media authoring.   

So we do things differently.

> ...
> >And I still see many in the Linux and FreeBSD world advocating
> >one large filesystem for everything.  The day they corrupt the 
> >/ filesystem, and it is the only system, perhaps they will see the
> >error of their ways.

> >In multiple filesystem systems [that is not redunant] except
> >for full HD failure, I've never lost / AND the other file
> >systems.

> We create a separate file system for a mirror of the root
> file system (/etc/fstab is slightly different). This permits
> us to boot into the backup partition in case the primary is
> corrupted, and also makes upgrades far safer as there's always
> a fall back available. Typically on Linux systems we have four
> partitions on the first hard drive, swap, ``/'', ``/backroot'',
> and ``/home'' with /usr/local symlinked to /home/local.

I wish more people would take the time to understand file systems
and how they work.   As above - I still see many advocating 
one huge file system - and one of their reasons is so they don't
run out of space in any one file system.  I think they must
be MS converts.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com