From owner-freebsd-stable Sun Jul 23 7:46:14 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from hugo10.ka.punkt.de (hugo10.ka.punkt.de [194.77.233.242]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 11AB537BA53 for ; Sun, 23 Jul 2000 07:46:09 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from hausen@punkt.de) Received: (from ry93@localhost) by hugo10.ka.punkt.de (8.9.3/8.9.3) id QAA94743; Sun, 23 Jul 2000 16:44:56 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from ry93) From: "Patrick M. Hausen" Message-Id: <200007231444.QAA94743@hugo10.ka.punkt.de> Subject: Re: No /boot/loader (dangerously dedicated) In-Reply-To: <200007221638.MAA33488@aldan.algebra.com> from Mikhail Teterin at "Jul 22, 2000 12:37:30 pm" To: mi@aldan.algebra.com (Mikhail Teterin) Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2000 16:44:56 +0200 (CEST) Cc: jhb@pike.osd.bsdi.com (John Baldwin), stable@FreeBSD.ORG X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL54 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hello all! Mikhail Teterin wrote: > John Baldwin once stated: > > ="No, you shouldn't." Some SCSI controllers are _known_ to go haywire > =with a dangerously dedicated disk since it uses a completely bogus > =geometry. > > Then those need to be explicitly listed and, better yet, identified at > install time... This is, however, a one shot deal, but you'll be wasting > those 5Mb forever. Personally I don't mind 5 MB wasted space - our production machines have one GB of swap _just_in_case_ some Godzilla email from hell hits them or some kiddy tries to DOS our Apache or whatever ... But ... I explicitly installed _all_ production machines "dangerously dedicated" _to_get_around_ geometry problems. So I could swap SCSI controllers of different brands with different translations. So I just wouldn't need to care if the disk was > 1GB or not. Try what happens if you install a "proper" partition table with an Adaptec controller and swap it for an NCR one - boom! Try the same with a dedicated disk ... Folks, gemoetries are for brain damaged PC operating systems. All the box needs to boot is a proper MBR. BIOSes that don't boot from a dedicated disk are _broken_. I definitely would mind _reinstalling_ > 20 servers to upgrade to 5.x eventually. So please leave it as a "compatibility mode" or whatever, but don't dump support for dedicated disks. I'm really puzzled by this thread, because after years of running FreeBSD I've come to the opinion that "dedicated" is how disks should be partitioned under all circumstances ... I mean, where's the partition table on my Sparc systems running Solaris? Who would care installing MS OSs additionally to FreeBSD on a server providing 24x7 service? Regards, Patrick -- --- WEB ISS GmbH - Scheffelstr. 17a - 76135 Karlsruhe - 0721/9109-0 --- ------ Patrick M. Hausen - Technical Director - hausen@punkt.de ------- "Contrary to popular belief, penguins are not the salvation of modern technology. Neither do they throw parties for the urban proletariat." To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message