From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Nov 11 14:44: 7 2000 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 5EC1F37B479 for ; Sat, 11 Nov 2000 14:44:04 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 9280 invoked by uid 100); 11 Nov 2000 22:44:03 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14861.52147.386178.344667@guru.mired.org> Date: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 16:44:03 -0600 (CST) To: Peter Cornelius Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Unable to create /dev/X In-Reply-To: <78347603@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 Peter Cornelius types: > Since there's loads of space to waste on that disk, I thought it was a > good idea to have a separate slice for /, /var, /tmp, /home, /usr, /usr/local, > /usr/src, /usr/X11 (which I was to symlink to whichever version I run) and > so on. First, FreeBSD terminology. The things that DOS users call partitions (4 to a disk, unless you have logical ones inside another one) are called "slices". The things you can mount file systems on are called "partitions". Since FreeBSD can't put a file system on a logical slice, I assume you mean partitions, not slices. 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. > What I did not think of beforehand is that I seemingly ran out of > device nodes for /dev/ad..., so /stand/sysinstall put /dev/X (yes, a > literal 'X') into /dev/fstab which obviously causes problems. What you actually ran out of was partitions - you only have 8 usable partitions per slice. So your 8 file systems and swap is to many. I'd be interested to know the 9 device names you used for this. 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? > Now, here comes the question: Is there a way to get around that (Well, > obviously, I could make /usr one big slice, but besides that.)? Or, was I to > use a simple mknod with the appropriate numbers, whichever these might be...? > Or did I slam the hard limit again...? 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.