Partioning disks -- warning...

[Marcus J. Ranum]

In article <1990Nov4.163016.3492 at ircam.ircam.fr> mf at ircam.fr (Michel Fingerhut) writes:
>
>The chpt utility does not check for blatantly incorrect partioning of a disk.
>Neither do any of the file system checking utilities, nor, apparently, the
>disk driver (and/or the error log mechanism).  Moral: see below.

	I agree that it would be nice if they'd complain, or at least politely
point out: "you say this is an RA81, are you sure it has 43,553,433 blocks?"
but I don't think that it should be *enforced* - have you ever tried to hook
a foreign disk up to a machine that rigidly enforces drive parameters ? Ick.
chpt -q shows you the overlaps of various partitions - watch it compulsively
when partitioning.

	I believe the idea is to use the default system tools for "ordinary"
installs, and if you need to tweak the partitions you're assumed to be a
guru-type. I don't think that approach is "wrong", really, since most people
are probably perfectly happy with the default partitioning.

	The UNIX systems administrator's toolset is traditionally pretty bad
in catching typos (I type "chpt -d /dev/rra0a" instead of "-q" and...) but
I don't think ULTRIX is the only guilty party here. I was really impressed
with the graphical disk partition/filesystem editor in SunOs 2.X-3.X install
procedure, but it's been discontinued. I don't know for sure why, but I
wonder if it might be because they wound up having lots of users calling
because they were having so much fun laying out their file systems in some
bizarre layout that they wound up having to redo them in 2 months. (and
of course that's always the vendor's fault, since they provided the tool)
First time I fooled with Sun's install, the result was one seriously messed-up
system. I had a good time playing with it, though.

mjr.