OT: redhat

[Bill Vermillion]

On or about Fri, Nov 05 20:16 , while attempting a Zarathustra 
emulation Fairlight thus spake: 

> This public service announcement was brought to you by Bill Vermillion:

> > 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.

> Not necessarily. I've seen systems where people allocated the
> defaults from the vendor and ended up running low on /usr, etc.
> Having /usr separate was also a pain depending on what was and
> wasn't dynamically linked against what at boot. :(

I just don't see the sense in having a single / on a 40GB or larger
disk, which is what I'm seeing recommended by some people in some
of the newsgroups.

> I've run out of space on a smaller fs before and I've done
> things like relocat all of /usr/X11R6 to /home/.X11R6 and
> symlink over to buy myself space.

> A good many times, it's not so much converts as people that
> don't actually know what they're system will necessarily grow
> out to later on.

> With journalling to avoid fsck's, and good backup policies, is
> it even as much of an issue these days, that a large single /
> really -needs- to be avoided?

Journaling is not the be-all end-all that many make it out to be.

I'm more on the side of McKusick, Seltzer, etc., with the
soft-updates and background fsck.  SoftUpdates will keep the file
system intact, with the potential loss of data in an unexpected
crash, but in a journaled system you can lose the file system
integrity.    The documens on softupdates are impressive, but many
don't want to go through a 40 page pdf with charts to understand
the process.

I've seen more than one system with / corrupted while everyting
else is intact.   And the added plus of being able to update
the OS while leaving all the user data in place is another added
value.  And if the / is corrupted, you can remake the / fs
and re-install the OS while keeping all the user data and locally
installed programs.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com