From owner-freebsd-arch Sat Dec 8 21:42: 6 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from apollo.backplane.com (apollo.backplane.com [216.240.41.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0B08137B423 for ; Sat, 8 Dec 2001 21:42:01 -0800 (PST) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by apollo.backplane.com (8.11.6/8.9.1) id fB95fuJ35335; Sat, 8 Dec 2001 21:41:56 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dillon) Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2001 21:41:56 -0800 (PST) From: Matthew Dillon Message-Id: <200112090541.fB95fuJ35335@apollo.backplane.com> To: Bernd Walter Cc: Peter Wemm , Wilko Bulte , "David O'Brien" , Garance A Drosihn , "Louis A. Mamakos" , Sheldon Hearn , Kirk McKusick , freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Proposed auto-sizing patch to sysinstall (was Re: Using a larger block size on large filesystems) References: <20011209003829.C6171@cicely8.cicely.de> <20011209005732.019053808@overcee.netplex.com.au> <20011209025547.B7042@cicely8.cicely.de> <200112090223.fB92NKf34327@apollo.backplane.com> <20011209041249.D7042@cicely8.cicely.de> <200112090359.fB93xTL34741@apollo.backplane.com> <20011209061231.E7042@cicely8.cicely.de> Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG :/home is pointing to a network shared home - right? :/var/users is local - if you have a local home. :That doesn't mean that you can't link them against if you don't see the :need to differenciate. Again, this doesn't make much sense to me. Who says /home has to point to a network share? Who says /var/users has to be local? When people get involved with network configurations there are no standards... there are a thousand ways to set such a machine up. For example, at BEST the /home's on our shell machines containing mainly softlinks, one for each user, pointing to various other partitions. Administrative directories were left in /home, user directories were typically softlinks to other partitions, and on our old SGI's user directories in the /home of one machine were softlinked to NFS mounted volumes. :This is only a sign that it's already been diffused. :As long as you don't have local homes and network wide homes together :it doesn't matter - but I doubt that any serious administrator of a :multihost user architecture uses adduser. And I doubt any serious administrator of a multihost user architecture uses the 'A'uto option to sysinstall either, a point I've tried to make several times that you seem to be missing. :Just an example: :You use /home on a single machine and later add another machine. :Now you may want a shared home for both machines. :But were do you mount it? /var/home? /net/home? There are thousand ways this could be done. You might want to mount the network home on /home. Me? I would probably mount the network home on /machine/home and create softlinks in my local /home to point to it on a user by user basis. Amoung other things that would allow me to distribute my userbase across a number of NFS servers if I so desired, rather then just one, and I could still place administrative directories in the same local /home directly (without a softlink) to ensure that the machine could still be booted into single-user or into multi-user with only administrative accounts active. This type of configuration also allows me to distribute my users across local partitions (e.g. /u1, /u2, /u3) or a combination of local and remote partitons without having to worry about the crash of a 'large' disk taking out a heavily used path like /home. Etc... It is simply not the 'A'uto option's job to try to deal with these complex situations. -Matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message