Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!hoptoad!amdahl!cit-vax!mangler
From: mangler@cit-vax.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,alt.flame
Subject: disk, ethernet utils should be on root fs
Message-ID: <4114@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: Sun, 4-Oct-87 03:47:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: cit-vax.4114
Posted: Sun Oct  4 03:47:04 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 4-Oct-87 10:36:30 EDT
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 24
Keywords: sun diskless bootstrap debug tools
Xref: hoptoad comp.unix.wizards:4540 alt.flame:200

This is the second time in a month that having /usr/ucb/netstat
on the root filesystem could have saved me several hours of
head-scratching.  It's hard to figure out why an NFS-mount of
/usr fails when all the necessary tools are on /usr!

With Sun having moved a bunch of stuff to /usr/etc, more utilities
come to mind, such as dumpfs and tunefs (tunefs only works with the
filesystem dismounted, how is one going to use /usr/etc/tunefs upon
/usr, if /usr is dismounted?)

My server developed some flakey blocks on /usr, and I wanted to find
out which files contained them.  Guess where icheck and ncheck are?
Right, /usr/etc.

What if I needed to install a default route in order to NFS-mount /usr?
Yep, route is in /usr/etc.

Can't mount /usr because of Yellow-Pages problems?  /usr/bin/ypcat isn't
going to be available to help diagnose.

Kind of defeats the purpose of a root filesystem if you can't do anything
until /usr is mounted...

Don Speck   speck@vlsi.caltech.edu  {amdahl,elroy,oberon}!cit-vax!speck