gpart and bsdlabel

[Michael W. Lucas]

On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 03:02:45PM -0600, Warren Block wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Jul 2014, Michael W. Lucas wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm gradually switching from the familiar and comfortable agony of
> > fdisk/disklabel to gpart.
> >
> > In the past, our org has avoided certain partition letters on specific
> > drives. If the drive isn't a boot drive, it has no 'a" partition. If
> > it has no swap, it has no 'b' partition.
> >
> > gpart assigns partition letters in the order in which they're created.
> >
> > Is there a way to specify which partition letter you want to create,
> > or start with, or something?
> 
> Interesting question.  I always figured the letters were dynamic.  If 
> they are static, maybe -l could be used to assign them to BSD 
> partitions.

Once upon a time, many many years ago, I assigned da4s1b as a database
partition. This was a non-boot drive, and we didn't need more swap
space.

Everything went fine until the machine misbehaved while I was out of
town.

A junior sysadmin "fixed" the "broken" "swap" partition. The machine
now had lots of virtual memory, but the database files were nowhere to
be found.

I wish this wasn't a true story.

==ml

-- 
Michael W. Lucas  -  mwlucas at michaelwlucas.com, Twitter @mwlauthor 
http://www.MichaelWLucas.com/, http://blather.MichaelWLucas.com/