[ILUG] apt-cdrom q

[Justin Mason]

Paul Jakma said:

> or even worse, sometimes these weird mount points are not used
> directly, instead the sysadmins create sane names by symlinking in /
> to these weird /u??? dirs, eg /foo -> /u01. why?
> 
> mount(2) is mechanism to create a sane namespace and to hide the
> details of the underlying storage from the namespace. why deliberately
> go out of your way to fsck this up?

Separation of physical storage from logical use.  If you've got a busy
server which has a fs on /usr/local with 2gb free, and /home suddenly runs
out of space... what do you do? 

  a) Power down the machine to add a new disk, assuming you have spares?

  b) shutdown to single-user so you can modify the partition sizes?

  c) Create a symlink to /usr/local/home-spill?

  d) wish you'd mounted the partition on a "usage-agnostic" mountpoint so
  you didn't have to confuse matters with c)?

I reckon d) ;) Better to have the fs mounted as /u1 or /export/1 or /.1 or
whatever, and create symlinks from /usr/local to that...

You could always say "they should have had enough space on /home to start
with", but on a busy server, Parkinson's Law of Data applies; the data
will expand to fill the space available ;)

Hopefully LVM will get into the main kernel tree, and support the other
nice things like RAID, journalling fs'es, NFS exporting etc. at some stage
soon (if it hasn't already).

At that point, we can just use mountpoints for their logical uses and
avoid kludgy symlinks to partition mountpoints...

--j.