Re: newfs by fstab directory name?

On Tuesday 28 October 2003 12:05, David O'Brien wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 27, 2003 at 01:26:23PM -0800, Wes Peters wrote:
> > At work we do a lot of dynamic filesystem creation, so we added the
> > ability to specify the 'special file' argument to newfs via the
> > fstab mount point directory.  Please see the attached patch.  If
> > nobody objects, I'll commit this in a couple of days.
>
> Not objecting, but I don't follow how the change is to be used.
> Can you post an example?

Sure.  Example from /etc/fstab:

/dev/ad0s1d            /tmp            ufs     rw              2 2
/dev/ad0s1f            /usr            ufs     rw              2 2
/dev/ad0s1e            /var            ufs     rw              2 2
/dev/acd0              /cdrom          cd9660  ro,noauto       0 0
/dev/da0s1e            /spool          ufs     rw,noauto       0 0

The disk space on /spool is managed by the "application" and isn't
guaranteed to be on-line or even existent when the "system" portion
loads and starts the application.  This space is entirely transient
data that doesn't need to be saved across reboots.  When the 
application starts, it checks to see if /spool is clean; if so it
just mounts it, if not it newfs's it and then mounts it.  This
space isn't necessarily always "da0s1e" but it is always "/spool"
across different hardware platforms.  We prefer to:

	newfs /spool

rather than

	. {some file full of shell variables describing the hardware}
	newfs $SPOOL_PARTITION

because the former is slightly more concise.  We had a local patch to do 
this in our 4.x code base, but it seemed a general enough change that 
others might find it useful as well.  I recall ecountering this same 
problem at DoBox so it appears to be a general problem for disk-based 
appliances, at least if you want to support differing hardware.

-- 
         "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"

Wes Peters                                              wes_at_softweyr.com