Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2000 02:18:45 -0600 (CST) From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: Peter Cornelius <pcc@gmx.net> Cc: questions@freebsd.org, Subject: Re: Unable to create /dev/X Message-ID: <14863.41957.11057.509067@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <17933.974099016@www30.gmx.net> References: <14861.52147.386178.344667@guru.mired.org> <17933.974099016@www30.gmx.net>
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Peter Cornelius <pcc@gmx.net> types: > > Now - why did you think having lots of partitions is a good idea? > > That the sizes of all the above match your backup media is about the > > only reason I can think of for doing that. > Partitions filling up seperately might be another. Actually, that's a reason to have them *not* be on different file systems! Let's say you split /usr/X11 off of /usr. Now one of the two fills up. Your choices are to trim one of the two back (which is work), or move stuff from one to the other (which is also work). Eventually, you run out of things to trim back - so you've got to move stuff from /usr/X11 to /usr. If you're free to move stuff back and forth, then you might as well have put it all on one partition to begin with. This one works if the stuff on the different partitions mirrors some organizational division - typically budget lines. If one runs out, that's tough - the people in that organization have to cope, and no one else is bothered. These days, disk drives are cheap enough that getting each such organization to buy a disk is a reasonable (and I've done that one). > > Mangling /etc/fstab (that is what you meant, right?) sounds like a bug > > - probably from walking past the end of an array somewhere. Care to > > try recreating it? > Well, sysinstall allows to 'add' more... er... partitions, just when it > runs out of them, in fstab, they'll have /dev/X as their device names. So, > when I ran her up, I dropped straight into the emergency shell, since obviously > there's no /dev/X that I could possibly mount a fs on. So, to commented out > those entries in fstab, that's all: > # Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass# > /dev/ad0s1b none swap sw 0 0 > /dev/ad0s1a / ufs rw 1 1 > /dev/ad0s1g /home ufs rw 2 2 > /dev/ad0s1f /tmp ufs rw 2 2 > /dev/ad0s1h /usr ufs rw 2 2 > #/dev/X /usr/X11 ufs rw 2 2 > /dev/ad0s1d /usr/local ufs rw 2 2 > #/dev/X /usr/src ufs rw 2 2 > /dev/ad0s1e /var ufs rw 2 2 > /dev/acd0c /cdrom cd9660 ro,noauto 0 0 > proc /proc procfs rw 0 0 Ok, that actually makes sense. You asked for file systems, but there was no place to mount them on the device - so it made up a simple name that wouldn't work. Watching sysinstall from a recent -stable, it actually writes "/dev/X" onscreen as the device name while you're doing this. It won't let you use the c partition, and it should warn you about this. On the other hand, the original author of sysinstall is still maintaining it, so I'm sure he knows about this. You might PR it if you want; I'm not going to bother. > > Yes, you ran into a hard limit. There are a couple of workarounds, > > though. > > > > You could put /tmp on a memory file system. That saves you one file > > system, so it fits. > > > > If you've got a spare slice, you can divide your FreeBSD slice into > > two slices, and then put partitions in both slices. With 8 partitions > > per slice, that gives you 16 partitions. They'll be called > > /dev/ad0s#?, where # is the slice number (1, 2, 3 or 4), and ? is the > > partition letter (a-h), so it would be, for instance /dev/ad0s2a for > > root, and /dev/ad0s3d for /home. > Hmmm... thanks a lot for the quick lecture :) I'll dive into the deeper > realms of my dark soul now and decide... I'd really like to have /usr/src on a > separate partition since I've grown the habit of having the ports reside > there, too, and that tree tends to grow over time... But then again, it does > not really matter what happens /usr as long as / does not fill up, so... These days, /var is the nasty one. About the only thing that writes to / except for admin changes is password updating. So when / fills up, people can't change their password, you can't install new kernels, can't update config files, etc. That's a minor headache, and pretty quickly noticed. /var filling up means daemons start hanging trying to write to logs, or you miss log messages, which is a worse problem. Thanx, <mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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