Chris Siebenmann writes: > > History lesson: until people could afford to purchase more than > > one disk and before Sun invented the diskless workstation (with > > shared /usr), everything was under /. > > As Richard knows but other people may not, this is ahistorical on > Unix.
While history discussions are fun, this one distracts from the problem at hand a bit. :-) Your problem (/opt is expected to be a part of the BE and things break when it isn't) is a case of "works as designed". Oracle has had the same problem, albeit with /var. In recent 11.2 versions, they have documented that behavior, and introduced a new separate dataset for all those things you *don't* want to have under BE management. The dataset is called rpool/VARSHARE and mounted under /var/share. There is a surprising amount of stuff in there, and most of it makes sense, too. If your boot hangs because of some failing binary, you will still have the core dump in /var/share/cores when you go back to the last BE. The audit logs are still there, etc. etc. Even the mail spool now is in /var/share/mail. Symlinks are provided for the legacy locations (like /var/mail). So one way would be to follow that example and create an OPTSHARE dataset, mount it under /opt/share, and symlink all the stuff you need to be outside the BE into it. We have considered this idea, as we build our software for the /opt/local tree, for precisely the same reasons you cite for your separate /opt dataset. However, in the end it is not worth it, due to the amount of extra work it causes. A better way is to IPS package everything properly, and add proper metadata to your packages, so that those packages that should go into a new BE do ask for one in their manifest. That way, there is no distinction between any "system" package living in /usr (or wherever) and your package living in /opt. You can leverage the tight integration of IPS, BEs, and ZFS for your stuff. Updating and rolling back becomes very easy. Disk space is not really an issue; ZFS snapshots are relatively cheap. Regards -- Volker -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Volker A. Brandt Consulting and Support for Oracle Solaris Brandt & Brandt Computer GmbH WWW: http://www.bb-c.de/ Am Wiesenpfad 6, 53340 Meckenheim, GERMANY Email: [email protected] Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Bonn, HRB 10513 Schuhgröße: 46 Geschäftsführer: Rainer J.H. Brandt und Volker A. Brandt "When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead" _______________________________________________ OmniOS-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.omniti.com/mailman/listinfo/omnios-discuss
