From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Dec 22 13: 6:11 2000 From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Dec 22 13:06:08 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 3FF4837B400 for ; Fri, 22 Dec 2000 13:06:08 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 87009 invoked by uid 100); 22 Dec 2000 21:06:07 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14915.49727.594106.46488@guru.mired.org> Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2000 15:06:07 -0600 (CST) To: Dan Nelson Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Root Partitions In-Reply-To: <42461660@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Dan Nelson types: > 3) To make sure that if /usr gets damaged, you've at least got a > minimal system in /. I may not be remembering this right, since it > doesn't make much sense. Modern disks have sector sparing and > early-warning notification so you know when the media's going bad, and > FFS had been stable for a long time. No, that's exactly right. The key word is "modern systems". This rule makes a lot more sense if you think about running BSD on a million dollar vax with a couple of thousand userids, 100+ simultaneous users and drives like ra82s - which for the first year or so were shipped with an HDA that had glue that tended to flake off inside the drive, thus pretty thoroughly destroying it with no warning whatsoever. If you want an r/o root, /var can't be on it. If you want to share the root file system, /var would be a good thing not to share. Some spools can be shared, but I wouldn't bet on all of them. /usr is another level of thing for sharing. Also, if you configure things right, you can arrange it so that everything on /usr (except a few config files) comes off the FreeBSD distribution disks, and thus doesn't need to be backed up along with everything else. Only the last of those things is liable to apply to a new user - and possibly not even that. I'd recommend that new users set up two file systems, one for everything from FreeBSD, and one for /home, so that after they have more experience and a better idea of what they're going to be doing, they can reinstall the OS without losing their /home. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Unix/FreeBSD consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message