Date: 09 May 2003 00:17:14 +0100 From: Paul Richards <paul@freebsd-services.com> To: Luigi Rizzo <rizzo@icir.org> Cc: David O'Brien <arch@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Fw: /rescue Message-ID: <1052435833.619.49.camel@cf.freebsd-services.com> In-Reply-To: <20030508155643.A16895@xorpc.icir.org> References: <XFMail.20030508161532.jhb@FreeBSD.org> <1052433564.619.32.camel@cf.freebsd-services.com> <20030508155643.A16895@xorpc.icir.org>
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On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 23:56, Luigi Rizzo wrote: > On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 11:39:24PM +0100, Paul Richards wrote: > ... > > If people get used to nvi being available as a recovery tool then > > they'll never learn the skills necessary to recover from severe system > > failures. I think we're beginning to dumb down the expected skill levels > > a bit too much. > > oh come on... an editor is just a convenience thing, plus there is > a reasonable (though limited) emulation of vi in the "e3" editor > (in ports/editors/e3) which is some 25k (yes twentyfive) statically > linked. Well, at least when I went through college, which granted is a while ago now, learning ed was a basic skill required as part of the Unix course. You're only going to need to do this sort of recovery in exceptional circumstances, a luxury like vi is not a *required* tool. If you don't know ed then you're not going to be any use at all on some of the commercial systems so I still think it's a basic skill all sysadmins will/should have. As has already been pointed out, not all FreeBSD boxes have big root partitions, it would be bad if future releases didn't work on existing installations without reformatting the disk, or even upgrading it. I have a live system that only has a 256M root partition, and that's only as far back as the 4.3 era, with earlier versions I only had 64M root partitions. I upped my / size for new systems when /boot arrived. If a screen oriented editor fits then great, but a fixit floppy will still be an essential tool in the future and so minimising the recovery toolset so it fits on a floppy would, I think, be a good idea. -- Paul Richards <paul@freebsd-services.com> FreeBSD Services Ltd
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