Re: Can't change partition table anymore

On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 15:47 +0200, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> In message <1112618841.71324.23.camel_at_buffy.york.ac.uk>, Gavin Atkinson writes:
> >On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 07:28 +0400, Andrey Chernov wrote:
> >> BTW, the trick with kern.geom.debugflags=16 works and I put it permanently 
> >> in my sysctl.conf. Could you please make it ON by default or make a 
> >> warning at least?
> >
> >I actually agree with this.  It's so frustrating to not be able to do
> >what you want to do as root.
> 
> I tend to belive in sensible safety features.  Forcing people who
> do potentially dangerous acts to release the safety-catch mechanism
> first doesn't strike me as a bad idea.
> 
> Only the most orthodox darwinists argue that guns should be sold
> armed and loaded from curb-side, child-height baskets.

Only the most anti-gun people would say that the safety catch should
consist of a codeword only known by the guy who designed the gun and
four or five other people who work at the factory.

We're not talking about curb-side child-height baskets.  We're talking
about people who should know what they are doing (they have root, after
all), entering commands which they expect to work...

  gmirror label -v -b round-robin data da0
  bsdlabel -e da0s1

There are plenty of other ways to trash a system accidentally without
raw access to the disk, and there are plenty of reasons to want to
manipulate the raw disk which won't trash the system.

Do you honestly believe the best way to do this is to boot off a fixit
CD or to toggle a random bit?

This is something I strongly believe in.  If someone who understands the
geom design were to suggest how best to overcome the problem, then I'd
be willing to put some time into finding a solution.  I don't believe
what we have now is the best solution.

Gavin