[ On Tuesday, April 11, 2000 at 00:08:59 (-0500), Peter Seebach wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: /etc/rc.d/ runs slowsly 
>
> As an interesting data point, the SVR4 Unix I used *COULD NOT REBOOT CLEANLY*
> if /usr was a separate partition.

I had the same problems with early versions of SunOS-4.  I'm not even
sure 4.1.4 fixed it entirely because by then I was carting my /etc/rc
around to all the SunOS-4 systems I managed.

Of course SunOS-4 had other related bogosities too, such as shared
binaries in /bin, etc.

> Actually, given that, I still tend to prefer / and /usr separate - mostly
> because of password files.  / can be backed up easily, /usr takes a while
> and doesn't really have data.

This is certainly a valid concern, though as I'll try to demonstrate it
isn't really something you should have to worry about.

Personally I'm reasonably pleased that most of what's in /etc these days
(on *BSD) is just configuration files and user-configurable scripts,
etc. [it would be nice to move some databases, such as /etc/services
(which I consider to be commonly immutable), to /usr/share].  This means
of course that one can generally get away with backing up just /etc (and
maybe /root if you happen to keep anything in there) using a
file-by-file backup method.  A careful pedant (such as myself :-) will
usually arrange to have all add-on configuration files under /etc too,
such as /etc/X11/{xdm,xfs}, etc.  So, backing up / without /usr still
isn't really an issue, at least not for me....

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
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