Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] world symlinking
Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2010 22:05:30
Message-Id: 201011030005.21833.alan.mckinnon@gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] world symlinking by Volker Armin Hemmann
1 Apparently, though unproven, at 23:21 on Tuesday 02 November 2010, Volker
2 Armin Hemmann did opine thusly:
3
4 > On Tuesday 02 November 2010, Alan McKinnon wrote:
5 > > Apparently, though unproven, at 20:19 on Tuesday 02 November 2010, Volker
6 > >
7 > > Armin Hemmann did opine thusly:
8 > > > On Tuesday 02 November 2010, Stroller wrote:
9 > > > > On 2/11/2010, at 10:46am, Alan McKinnon wrote:
10 > > > > > ...
11 > > > > > hard links will only work if /etc/portage and /var/lib/portage are
12 > > > > > on the same filesystem. Frequently, they are not.
13 > > > >
14 > > > > For small values of frequently.
15 > > > >
16 > > > > Stroller.
17 > > >
18 > > > for every sane system out there.
19 > > >
20 > > > /var is a candidate for surprisingly filling up / to 100% so it is a
21 > > > smart and sane choice to put it on its own partition where damage will
22 > > > be reduced to some log files or an aborted emerge.
23 > >
24 > > You're both right, but for different reasons. It'd done less often on a
25 > > laptop or personal machine than on a server for instance. And on embedded
26 > > stuff, almost never. Example: Any junior of mine who doesn't make /var
27 > > separate is liable to be served his own testicles for dinner, and they
28 > > know it. But my laptop is one big filesystem. One case definitely needs
29 > > it, the other one doesn't really.
30 > >
31 > > You're probably looking at the same question from entirely different
32 > > needs and viewpoints.
33 >
34 > I am looking at the question from the viewpoint of a person who was hit
35 > very hard in the past. Surprise / fillup thanks to /var or /tmp is no fun
36 > at all.
37
38 I feel your pain. I know it well. That's why I mentioned roasted testicles.
39
40 Right now I sit with 60+ SLES 9 machines that cannot be taken offline for any
41 reason, and EVERY SINGLE ONE has one giant filesystem except for the database
42 partitions - those are /dev/sdb in a RAID.
43
44 I cannot fix this and still maintain my SLA because
45
46 a) you can't reduce a mounted fs
47 b) you can't umount /
48 c) all disk bays are full
49 d) I don't have budget for bigger replacement drives
50 e) there's no way I'm sitting in that freezing data centre for a week fiddling
51 with disks, breaking RAID, putting bigger drives in, rebuilding RAID, fdisk,
52 mkfs, blah, blah, blah. And with my luck, all of those machines will decide
53 the stress of pulling drives will cause others to fail just at the exact point
54 I don't have redundancy.
55
56 How did this happen? The man in charge three managers ago thought this was a
57 cool way to configure critical servers. Because "One filesystem mounted at /"
58 was option #1 on the disk page of the SLES install wizard.
59
60 And lets not talk about the abuses /tmp can be subject to...
61
62 <sigh>
63
64 <rant over>
65
66
67 --
68 alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

Replies

Subject Author
[gentoo-user] Re: world symlinking walt <w41ter@×××××.com>
Re: [gentoo-user] world symlinking Peter Humphrey <peter@××××××××××××××.org>