> I guess my question would be why is a complex EXEC needed to do a > normal system administration task?
It's a multi-step process whether you do it at the hypervisor level or inside the Linux guest, so you're going to need some kind of scripting either way. The basic Unix philosophy is write tools that do one thing well, then use scripting to sequence the execution of the one-thing tools to accomplish bigger tasks. You could write a custom tool that did it all -- but you'd be duplicating a lot of work and you'd have to maintain it over time. Big PITA. I happen to be of the school that it's easier and simpler for this kind of preparation work to be done at the hypervisor level, and let the guest OS concentrate on identifying stuff it can use and managing the process of devices coming and going in a rational way. In this case, also, having swap is kind of necessary to getting Linux to run decently, and it's hard to do Linux stuff without a running Linux system, so creating SWAPGEN was a way to do the deed before you had a running Linux system to do it with. > A second question is why didn't > Novell provide a straightforward method for doing this and document it > in a manual (without using a complex 3rd party EXEC) ? It sounds like the issue is more that it's a 3rd party tool than that it's done the way it's done. If either of the distributors wants to include SWAPGEN, we're open to discussing the idea. No one has asked. It would be nice if the documentation included the way to set up DIAG disk I/O, though. -- db David Boyes Sine Nomine Associates ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
