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Date:      Fri, 22 Dec 2000 15:06:07 -0600 (CST)
From:      Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>
To:        Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com>
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Root Partitions
Message-ID:  <14915.49727.594106.46488@guru.mired.org>
In-Reply-To: <42461660@toto.iv>

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Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com> 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.

	<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Unix/FreeBSD consultant,	email for more information.


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