I don't have the faintest idea why IBM claims that you have to have an identical DASD layout on all machines that share an NSS.
Admittedly cursory testing seems to show that your NSS will have whatever parameter line you burned into it, which does specify a range of devices. But not only can those devices change size (I tested this with an ext3 and a swap filesystem), if you boot without a listed device, the only problem you will have that I could find was that you may trip over it in /etc/fstab. But if you have a disk that's not in /etc/fstab, which you detach before IPL, you can re-link and then access that disk pefectly normally from Linux (using the console or hcp to perform the link). So it's looking to *me* like you should pick a lowest-common-denominator disk layout (for most of our guests, that'd be / on 150, swap on VDISK on 151, and /usr on 152), build the NSS with as small a storage size as you can (24M works for us) and then not worry about it. If anyone can tell me why I'm wrong, and that, although I have mounted differently-sized disks, I'm heading for fatal filesystem corruption just around the corner, I'd appreciate it. Adam
