Dumping /usr to samba mounted drive

[Chuck Swiger]

Mike Loiterman wrote:
> Gayn Winters <mailto:gayn.winters at bristolsystems.com> wrote:
[ ... ]
>>> Changing the format of the drive to Mac OS Extended fixed the
>>> problem.  UFS has a 4 gig file size limit.
>>>
>> Mike,
>>
>> I'm glad you got it working.  What was Apple ever thinking with a 4GB
>> limit? 
>>
>> -gayn
> 
> Did Apple develop the UFS spec or just implement it? 

Apple's UFS implementation is a big-endian variant inherited from a mixture of
Sun and NEXTSTEP code back in the late 80's and early 90's, later seasoned by
BSD-4.4Lite.

The tradeoffs between HFS+ and UFS are sufficiently complex that neither is a
clear winner for general purpose uses, although UFS tends to do well for lots
and lots of little files-- think a squid cache, maildir mail spool, tradspool
INN layout of Usenet articles; HFS+ by contrast is Unicode-aware and thus
supports international filenames sanely, and the B-tree data structure handles
volume-wide operations more efficiently, with a lot less head motion, than the
highly-recursive tree traversal that UFS mandates.

If you're setting up very large filesystems, greater than 10 terabytes, the Xsan
product is a solution that even a non-expert admin can get working without
fighting too hard.  I haven't had the hardware to try to configure a comparably
large filesystem using UFS under FreeBSD, but anecdotes suggest that going above
either 2TB or 4TB constitutes sailing into unknown waters...

-- 
-Chuck