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From: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: A few minor prob left...
Message-ID: <1990Oct18.155648.27681@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 18 Oct 90 15:56:48 GMT
References: <9102@milton.u.washington.edu> <1990Oct15.050058.27579@ccng.waterloo.edu> <53614@brunix.UUCP>
Sender: news@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Reply-To: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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In article <53614@brunix.UUCP> rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony) writes:
>b) The second partition you usually find on bigger NeXT hard drives is there
>to mount network clients. If you have a standalone system, get rid of it and
>make your main file system bigger. This saves a lot of trouble with allocating
>files to filesytems and such 

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and either way you go there
can be problems.

Parititions can be very handy for isolating obnoxious users of disk space.
With a one-partition system, a single errant process can swallow ALL the
disk space.

Lest you think this an esoteric consideration, let me tell you what happened
on my single-partition 330 last weekend.

I keep some private libraries, and re-index them automatically at night.  Well,
one night the index process burped, and swallowed all disk on the machine.
Major disaster time, because /private/vm/swapfile couldn't grow when it
wanted to, and all sorts of things failed in all sorts of interesting ways.

I'm thinking strongly about partitioning my 330, and putting the swapfile
on a partition with only "well-behaved" things.  This would waste some disk
space, and would limit my swapfile size, but it also would protect me
from disasters like the above. 
--
Steve Dorner, U of Illinois Computing Services Office
Internet: s-dorner@uiuc.edu  UUCP: uunet!uiucuxc!uiuc.edu!s-dorner