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To: Charles Henrich <henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu>
cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, syssgm@dtir.qld.gov.au
Subject: Perils of login.conf (Was: fsck (2.2.5-RELEASE) large filesystems broken)
References: <19971023004136.21792@crh.cl.msu.edu> <199710240723.RAA15535@ogre.dtir.qld.gov.au> <19971024083642.18571@crh.cl.msu.edu>
In-Reply-To: <19971024083642.18571@crh.cl.msu.edu>
    from Charles Henrich at "Fri, 24 Oct 1997 08:36:42 -0400"
Date: Sat, 25 Oct 1997 11:54:11 +1000
From: Stephen McKay <syssgm@dtir.qld.gov.au>
Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
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[Moved from -bugs to -hackers for a bit of debate]

On Friday, 24th October 1997, Charles Henrich wrote:

>On the subject of Re: fsck (2.2.5-RELEASE) large filesystems broken, Stephen McKay stated:
>
>> I'd guess that you are being bitten by /etc/login.conf.  The comments in it
>> claim that 'daemon' is used by /etc/rc and 'daemon' has "datasize=32M".  Try
>> bumping this to 64M.
>
>Yes, that was it.  I'd like to take an assault rifle to the fellow who decided
>the defaults for FreeBSD is so limited, especially considering in most cases
>FreeBSD is installed as a one or two use system.

Ahem!  Well, I wouldn't be using anything more dangerous than Nerf bats
myself, but I have been inconvenienced a couple times by login.conf.

There are some people who are very keen on it, and presumably it does
wonderful things for them.  However, after some pain and a bit of reflection,
I think the defaults for everything should be pushed way up, like the maximum
that FreeBSD can take for all these knobs, and let those that support hundreds
or thousands of users wind them back to whatever limits they wish to impose.

If this was the case then regular users would have one less thing to worry
about and magazine reviewers who benchmark "out of the box" would get
sensible results.  Those who really use login.conf to impose carefully
selected limits would be unaffected.

Stephen.