Date: Wed, 6 Aug 1997 10:50:26 +0800 (TSD) From: Victor Sudakov <vas@vas.tomsk.su> To: questions@freebsd.org (freebsd questions mailing list) Subject: Re: having problems adding hard drives Message-ID: <199708060250.KAA12342@vas.tomsk.su> In-Reply-To: <199708040107.KAA00626@freebie.lemis.com> from "Greg Lehey" at "Aug 4, 97 10:37:02 am"
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Greg Lehey wrote: > Victor Sudakov writes: > > > > After several unsuccessful attempts to add a new hard drive with > > /stand/sysinstall, I gave up the idea and tried to add it in the traditional > > unix way. That is, running fdisk, modifying /etc/disktab, then running > > disklabel and newfs. It turned out to be a complete success. Many thanks to > > Greg Lehey for his nice book. > > You're welcome :-) > > > My advice: do not use /stand/sysinstall when you can avoid it. Frankly, I do > > not know a maintenance task that could not be accomplished without using > > sysinstall. Perhaps you can give me an example? Addind/deleting packages, > > setting time zone, adding parts of the source tree - all that is easily done > > without sysinstall. > > Well, I'm sorry to report that I added a new disk the other day, using > my own book of course, and I had the devil's own job getting it done. > The problem is that the values reported by the various utilities are > frequently all different. In an update to my book (posted every > Monday on this list), I said 'use the value returned by fdisk'. I'm > beginning to think that this isn't always the case. I'm still > actively working on this topic. > > In any case, I have now taken a look at Doug White's tutorial > (http://resnet.uoregon.edu/dwhite/makedisk.html), which explains how > to use sysinstall to do the job. Have you seen this tutorial? If so, > what problems did you have with it? If not, it could be that you > would have had more success with this method. Does anybody else have > any comments on the relative usability of the two methods? I think this is also an ideological question. In my opinion, a good unix admin should not become dependent on tools which vary from system to system. I believe the disktab method would work in any unix while the sysintall method would work only in FreeBSD. You may be very skilled in using sysinstall, but you may feel helpless if you change your job. -- Victor Sudakov http://www.tomsk.su/r/persons/vas.htm
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