On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 8:06 PM, Brian Hechinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This is not a purely Solaris phenomenon, this is a UNIX phenomenon. > People who run Linux or OSX (I can't speak for Windows users) tend to > be "new to the game" and feel that "This 40/80/500GB disk will never > fill up" and so don't believe that seperating /var is needed.
Why is having a full /var so much better than having a full /? I've had a number of Solaris systems fail to boot because it can't update /var/adm/utmpx, but I've never had one fail to boot because / was full. As best as I can deduce, the "root file system corruption when it gets full" is a combination of ancient history and urban legend. I've brought this up on a lengthy thread over at sysadmin-discuss a while back and have had no one refute my assertion with credible data. http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/sysadmin-discuss/2007-September/001668.html I've also shared more detailed thoughts on file system sprawl at... http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/sysadmin-discuss/2007-September/001641.html Really it boils down to lots of file systems to hold the OS adds administrative complexity and rarely saves more work than it creates. I believe this especially holds true for enterprise server environments where downtime is really expensive. I much prefer to ask for a 3 hour outage to patch than a 5 hour outage to relayout file systems then patch. Of course today's development work will make the 3 hour outage for patching a thing of ancient history as well. -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
