Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!ames!ig!bionet!agate!labrea!decwrl!decvax!ima!cfisun!lakart!dg
From: dg@lakart.UUCP (David Goodenough)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Unix deficiencies/problems
Message-ID: <532@lakart.UUCP>
Date: 4 May 89 15:08:30 GMT
References: <810046@hpsemc.HP.COM>
Organization: Lakart Corporation, Newton, MA
Lines: 37

gph@hpsemc.HP.COM (Paul Houtz) sez:
> I wrote:
>>   I am interested in peoples opinions of deficiencies or problems with 
>>unix.   Please send me e-mail or post here.  I would be happy to post
>>a summary.
> 
>   Oh,  I really should incude an example so one can get the idea of whata
> I mean:
> 
>   One thing I would categorize as a deficiency is the UNIX file system's
> inability to span disc drives.   In otherwords, your file system is limited
> to the size of a disc drive.    If you want more files in that file system,
> you must re-create it on a larger disc drive, or, if you already have the
> largest available, you must start putting files in multiple file systems.

Huh???

'We have the technology, we have the capability, to create the world's
first bionic "span-partition"'.

We have an ISI V24 (68020 machine) with a pair of Northern Telecom 269
MB drives, and I have been tempted for a long time to change the three
"work" partitons (/u1 /u2 /usr) into one big span partition - I could
probably do this in about five minutes, the instructions in the manual
say that it's trivial. It just so happens that /usr and /u1 live on
sm0, and /u2 lives on sm2, so I'd have a partition spanning two
separate disk drives.

Of course this may be a nice feature added by the ISI people, like the ttyd?
hack that when you call a terminal ttyd? (our modem line is ttydx), all the
necessary programs (getty, uucico, tip, etc.) know that it is a bidirectional
modem line, and behave sensibly.
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