[SunRescue] Max capacity of harddisk supported by SS20

[PaulTheodoropoulospaul at anastrophe.com]

There have been 'religious' wars going on in comp.unix.solaris for 
years now on the various partitioning philosophies. In my opinion, 
the issue is moot if you are using a recent revision of Solaris - 7 
or 8 - since journaling is built into the filesystem.

I've been running production systems for years now with just one 
BigAss(tm) root partition, along with swap. Once set up, I turn on 
logging in /etc/vfstab, and then it's nothing but smooth sailing. 
If the system is mission-critical, I mirror the boot disk, and 
still use journalling. Simplify, simplify, simplify. I'm currently 
mentoring a junior admin, and being able to simply say that the 
disk layout will always be root on /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 and swap on 
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1 eliminates confusion and uncertainty.

When the current technologies are taken together - large, fast 
disks with excellent MTBF, along with a mature OS that includes 
journalling - and the option to mirror in software when it's 
mission-critical - I think the scale tips in favor of a simple 
root-and-swap layout.

But - as always - this is just an opinion! There's no laws 
compelling anyone to partition their disks in any particular way, 
so if someone wants to set up a six gig partition for 
/usr/ucb,  well heck - more power to them.

regards,
paul


At 11:48 PM 7/20/00, you wrote:
>The way I see it, this is not a very good idea. The more you put 
>in one
>filesystem, the greater the risk that the file system gets 
>corrupted. By keeping
>all more or less frequently changing data on separate partitions 
>(/home, /var,
>/usr, /opt), your chances of being left with an inoperable system 
>are somewhat
>smaller. If you install a lot of free-/shareware software, keep 
>your /usr
>partition large. If you use a lot of commercial Sun software, keep 
>your /opt
>partition large.
>
>Camiel.

-----------------------------------
Paul Theodoropoulos   paul at atgi.net
Senior Unix Systems Administrator
Advanced Telcom Group, Inc.
Santa Rosa, California
Work: http://www.atgi.net
Play: http://www.anastrophe.com