nullfs in 4.10

Marc G. Fournier scrappy at hub.org
Tue Jun 22 15:25:05 GMT 2004


On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Bjoern Koenig wrote:

> Hello,
>
> first of all:
>
> THIS FILESYSTEM TYPE IS NOT YET FULLY SUPPORTED
> (READ: IT DOESN'T WORK) AND USING IT MAY, IN FACT,
> DESTROY DATA ON YOUR SYSTEM. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.
> BEWARE OF DOG. SLIPPERY WHEN WET.
>
> My experience:
>
> I had much less problems with unionfs -b, even with FreeBSD 4.10, to mount
> for example /usr/ports into a jail temporarily. But for everything else you
> should never use it.

BS, and then some ...

I have 4 servers in place right now, each running a minimum of 30 jail'd 
environments (my most full is running 67 right now) where usr is mounted 
using unionfs -b from a central template ... the *only* issues that I have 
is with fsck's on a long uptime takes a bit of time ...

The only caveat I'll make *against* unionfs at this time, and something 
that I'd like to see fixed eventually ... do not try and mount / and 
expect a jail to run ... there is a FIFO(?) created in the /var directory 
that will cause the server to panic ... but, from what I can tell, that is 
the only really big, outstanding bug that will hit you.  Between David 
Schultz and Tor, most of the rest of the "easy to trigger" bugs have been 
cleaned up.

Note: when I say "easy to trigger" ... as I said above, my servers run 
between 30 and 70 jail'd environments using unionfs, each jail'd 
environment being a totally different configuration, running within them 
anything from jabber, to aolserver, to jakarta-tomcat, etc ... the longest 
I've had a server run before doing an OS upgrade on it was ~120days or so, 
without a hitch ...





----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy at hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664


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