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Date:      Wed, 1 Mar 2000 10:52:46 -0600 (CST)
From:      Ryan Thompson <ryan@sasknow.com>
To:        Stuart Henderson <sthen@naiad.eclipse.net.uk>
Cc:        Rick Morel <rmorel@morelr.com>, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Root File System Full
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0003011042190.627-100000@stimpy.sasknow.com>
In-Reply-To: <20000301144255.Q82538@naiad.eclipse.net.uk>

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Stuart Henderson wrote to Rick Morel:

> On Wed, Mar 01, 2000 at 08:22:36AM -0600, Rick Morel wrote:
> > Many thanks to Phil Allsopp <phil@virtek.com> and wellsian
> > <wellsian@caffeine.com> for super rapid replies.
> > 
> > I forgot that /etc is really  under /.
> 
> You might consider moving and symlinking it to a
> different partition. From someone that learned the
> hard way some time ago, you probably don't want to
> do that :-)

/etc to a different partition?  That won't work without lots of help.

The system needs /etc early in the boot process... Perhaps most
importantly for this purpose, fstab lives in /etc... So if /etc is on a
different partition, fstab could never be read by the boot process,
meaning, the system wouldn't know where to find your other partition.

If I trusted the union FS a little more, I guess one COULD kludge things
sufficiently to put a minimal set (the RCs, fstab, etc al) in /etc and
later union mount another small dedicated partition for /etc... But you
really wouldn't gain anything there anyway.

I run my production servers with a RO root filesystem, with frequent
backups and extensive use of RCS.  If changes need to be made to /etc,
they are made to the files, verified, then the root filesystem is
remounted RW, changes are committed, and / is downgraded to RO once again.

I've never had a full root FS, nor have I ever had one corrupt while in
production.  And, due to the extensive mirroring I do, restoring the root
FS would be as simple as booting from floppy, newfs'ing the root
filesystem (or reallocating some swap space if the root was too far beyond
repair), mounting root and the partition(s) that my mirror lives on, and
restoring everything verbatim.  Due to my near-complete use of RCS for
configuration files, my incremental backups are never stale.

-- 
  Ryan Thompson <ryan@sasknow.com>
  Systems Administrator, Accounts
  Phone: +1 (306) 664-1161

  SaskNow Technologies     http://www.sasknow.com
  #106-380 3120 8th St E   Saskatoon, SK  S7H 0W2



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