Fresh install on gmirror'ed disks?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Hello!

On Fri, Mar 03, 2006 at 06:58:50PM -0800, George Hartzell wrote:

>  > http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200502/diskmirror.html
>  > 
>  > When the mirror is up and running, cvsup, buildworld, buildkernel,
>  > installkernel, installworld, mergemaster, reboot, enjoy ;-)
> 
> I think that the instructions in the above mentioned article mildly
> incorrect in that they enable soft-updates when they newfs the root
> partition.

AFAIK soft-updates don't put your root partition at risk _directly_.
You might run into problems, _if_ your root partition is rather
small, during installworld/installkernel. This is due to the
delayed freeing of data blocks when files are erased.
So your root partition might fill up even if there should be
plenty of space.

This has _never_ happened to me, though. My root partitions are all
at least 128 M in size and /var is _always_ separate and /tmp is
a symlink to /var/tmp.

I didn't notice that in Ralf's script, because I didn't copy
it verbatim ;-) Just used it as a guid through the process.

I did configure quite a few servers with soft-updates on all
partitions, when soft-updates were rather new and I was
excited about the performance gain and didn't know about
the possible problems with / - as I said, I never had a
single problem with that setup.

Regards,
Patrick
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