File system issues

[Ian Smith]

On Sat, 25 Oct 2014 12:11:16 -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
 > On Oct 25, 2014, at 11:36 AM, Kurt Jaeger <lists at opsec.eu> wrote:
 > 
 > > I always disable journaling, because I had many failures with that
 > > in the past:
 > > 
 > > tunefs -j disable <partition>
 > 
 > I turn it off because you cannot snapshot a journaled filesystem, 
 > which breaks live dumps.
 > 
 > It would be helpful if there was a way in the installer to toggle the 
 > default setting for 'journaled' before carving out the filesystems.  
 > It's moderately annoying to have to go through the option settings 
 > for all the filesystems to turn this off.

And if you do go back into the options settings for a filesystem, the 
options you have changed, like turning off journaling, have been (or at 
least, appear to have been) reset to defaults, so you can't just check 
what you've already set, but have to start again.

What I _really_ miss from sysinstall(8) is the ability to toggle the 
newfs flag.  What you need to do now if you wish to preserve an existing 
filesystem - quite commonly /home - is very deliberately NOT select that 
filesystem from those detected, finish the install then manually, later, 
readd that fs to /etc/fstab AND remove the created symlink from /home to 
/usr/home, recreate /home as a directory, AFTER moving created dotfiles 
if you forgot to NOT create a non-root user during install.  Relatively 
new users wouldn't have the slightest clue about needing to do that.

But then, the general expectation that new users will want a linux-style 
single / directory - sure, fine for VM use - cruels the potential to use 
dump and restore anyway.  It's a bit sad that this is still outstanding.

cheers anyway, Ian