> Subject: Big problems with snapshot/20000226, part 1

Hmm, where's part 2? :-)

> Towards the end of the tar for base.tgz, it starts kicking out errors
> of not being able to set the date and permissions on folders it is
> creating because / is full.

Sounds like the "tar loses when /tmp gets full" bug that got discussed
on some list or other (I can't recall which one) recently.

> I went out to the shell and tried to do the tar by hand, and got the
> same results.  / is pretty full (like 98%).  Here's the weird thing:
> I deleted /sysinst and df *still* says that / is about 98% full,

Welcome to crunched executables.  Most (all?) executables on the
installation ramdisk are hardlinks to the same file, which looks at
argv[0] to determine which program it should act like.  (This is done
because it turns out to save space bigtime.)

One idea: pick a small piece of disk somewhere you won't need until
after you get a minimal system unpacked.  Make a filesystem there.
Copy everything off the miniroot to that filesystem.  Boot from floppy,
but specify -a among the bootflags.  Specify that disk partition when
prompted for root device.  Then you should have more space available.

The aforementioned discussion also included comments that make me think
it might work to set TMPDIR in the environment, pointing to somewhere
with more space.

If you have enough RAM for it, you could also mount an mfs over
/tmp...if the installation kernel and ramdisk support mfs; I'm not sure
whether they do.

Fixing tar, of course, is the Right Thing, but that's not something
you're likely to do on the spot.

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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