From: zik@zikzak.apana.org.au (Michael Saleeba)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.amiga
Subject: ufs boot partitions are certain death!
Date: 21 Jan 1993 22:27:57 +1100
Organization: Zikzak public access UNIX, Melbourne Australia
NNTP-Posting-Host: zikzak.apana.org.au

rhealey@rogue.digibd.com (Rob Healey) writes:

>	AmigaUNIX does not like / and /usr being on seperate file systems
>	so keep / and /usr on the same filesystem. Preferably ufs.

Well I can't say I'd recommend ufs for a boot partition. I've been
messing with Amiga UNIX for around a year now and I've always had this
creeping problem with inodes just randomly being munged. As the system
has been getting busier (it's public access) the problem has been
getting worse. It would usually cause something like this on the
console:

       WARNING: inode=12345 fs=/

(Or something to that effect). The next time I fscked "/" I'd be
missing a file. Often it would reappear in lost+found. Now this was
all very well and not too annoying until one day it did this to
/etc/shadow! 

No shadow password file? "Not a problem", I think, "Just bring it up
in single-user mode".

       Enter system administration password to enter maintenance mode:

Ah. Ok. Enter the password that is in the non-existent password file
huh?

Some hours and much messing with boot floppies later a friend and I
had the system back on its feet. All was ok for the next little while.
Files disappeared at random but nothing _too_ important went, just
some bits of my own work and the system administration menu.

Then came the fateful day when it decided to munge the inode for
/usr/bin. Yes, /usr/bin became a _file_. Not really good for the
system, in fact it was back to the ol' boot floppies again... After a
little work I managed to fsck the filesystem back to sanity again.
Only trouble was that I now had a lost+found full of files with useful
names like #0072342, and no real way of finding out which was which.
Even if I took a punt at which was which from a scan of their strings,
there were over three hundred files and who can remember them _all_!?!

So it was back to the install tape. It took the two of us nineteen
hours straight to build up a system which would work, and this is what
it now looks like:

Filesystem            kbytes    used   avail capacity  Mounted on          
/dev/dsk/c6d0s1        24576   17772    6804    72%    /          (s5)
/dev/dsk/c6d0s4       245884  167406   53889    76%    /system    (ufs)  
/dev/dsk/c0d0s2       260628  235807   17002    93%    /news      (ufs)
/dev/dsk/c0d0s1          807       5     761     1%    /locks     (ufs)
/dev/dsk/c6d0s5        88750   26371   53504    33%    /home      (ufs)

So it boots off a _small_ s5 partition. Nearly everything that is
useful but not essential for booting is on /system, and there are big
fat gobs of soft links between the two filesystems. Quite early in the
startup /system is mounted and things become usable. You may wonder
why I went to all this trouble to have a s5 boot partition,
particularly when I can't stand the stupid 14 character filename
limit. The answer is simple - I haven't lost a single inode since I
changed over.

QED.

And now I can sleep soundly at night, knowing that my password file
and my /usr/bin will be there in the morning!

The moral of the story - DON'T USE ufs BOOT PARTITIONS! THEY ARE POISON!

+-----------------------------------+----------------------------------------+
|          -|-   Zik   -|-          |           WANTED!                      |
|     zik@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au    |       Schodinger's cat                 |
|          Michael Saleeba          |        Dead or alive       - unknown   |
+-----------------------------------+----------------------------------------+