dinah@shell.UUCP (Dinah Anderson) (02/01/89)
We have opted to mount /usr rw. Many of our systems change on a daily
basis and we do not want to unmount (i.e. re-boot since mount now lives in
/usr/etc!) and re-mount /usr everytime we want to make a change to the
system. (install software, change kernels, etc.) It would be a nightmare.
Now we have the nightmare of worrying about a corrupted /usr. We are just
starting to migrate to 4.0 and we are making a lot of decisions on how we
think things work. Where possible, we are trying to use new 4.0 features
(like the automounter). It is not clear that the /usr mounted ro is a
feature we want to use.
I hope to see more discussion here about the pros and cons so that we can
make a more educated decision about this as we continue with our
migration.
Dinah Anderson
Shell Oil Company, Information Center (713) 795-3287
...!{sun,psuvax,soma,rice,ut-sally,ihnp4}!shell!dinahbob@kahala.hig.hawaii.edu (Bob Cunningham) (02/03/89)
You noted, >... Now it is currently >our custom to use rdist to keep all our /usr's on our various fileservers >identical, but if /usr is mounted readonly I would guess that will no >longer work.... In SunOS4.0+ it becomes attractive to locate non-Sun software elsewhere other than the /usr partition (all our /usr/local/mumble directories are now typically logical links to other partitions and/or automounted), especially since when you first install SunOS4.0 the install program will try to create a VERY full /usr partition (in ocasional cases, too small even to upgrade to SunOS4.0.1 without going back and rebuilding the /usr partition size first...I highly recommend adding at least few extra Mbytes onto the /usr partition when installing SunOS4.0; if you'll actually be adding some other software there be generous, very generous). So, one approach would be to install the blurfl and other packages in another (rw mounted) partition, leaving behind just a logical link somewhere in the (ro mounted) /usr partition. Another approach would be to mount /usr rw only on your servers (the only systems on which you're likely going to be doing changes). Another is, just before running rdist, run a script that uses the new remount option of the mount command to change the /usr partition's status from ro to rw (haven't tried this myself, but looks feasible).
mr@uunet.uu.net (02/09/89)
Try "man mount", under the -o flag:
$ mount -o remount /usr
Martin Reed, Racal Imaging Systems Ltd
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