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19990702: solaris x86 install

>From: alan anderson <address@hidden>
>Organization: St. Cloud State
>Keywords: 199907012031.OAA25003 Solaris x86 install

Alan,

>Thank you; with help like you people provide, my interest and ambition
>are always rekindled.  I apologize for not having the details of how 
>this problem was solved on waldo;  I do have my own file of our email
>exchanges, but obviously I did not use it or your archive as I should have.

No problem at all.  Setting up a new system is not something that I would
expect anyone (except system administrators) to remember long term.  The
only reason that I remembered quickly was that I went through the same
thing on the PC that I setup with triple boot: Windows NT 4.0, Solaris x86,
and Redhat Linux.

>Another question prompted by your answer.  When we installed, on waldo, 
>we initially chose a default file system setup provided in the install menu.

Right, I remember.

>That resulted in an allocation of disk space that was not reasonable
>for ldm & mcidas space needs.  At that point, Don mentioned that if 
>we reinstalled, one option was to  just put all (or nearly all) space in 
>the root file system.  

Yes, and I agree with Don's recommendation whole heartedly.

>That is the choice we made, and now have done the same  on 2nd machine;
>everything is in root except for 512 MB in swap.  This is how the /home 
>issue has come about.  

Right you are.  If you had allocated space for /home during the x86
installation the automounter stuff would have never come up.

>I don't mind the work around for /home (thanks to you), but if you have a 
>suggestion for file system set up during install, please feel free to 
>tell us.

Allocating everything in / (the root file system) makes sense.  I would
stick with that strategy.

>Are we courting other problems with having everything in root?

No, I don't think so.

>I think we have 2 machines (besides waldo) with 10GB disks;  the others in
>our lab have smaller disks, I think about 3GB.  As you know, Solaris only
>lets us use about 8GB of the 10.

Actually, how much of the disk is used depends on how it can be seen
by the boot strap loader.  For bootable partitions, the boot information
for the OS has to exist in cylinders below 1024.  The BIOS on some
PC systems can make large disks look like they have 1024 cylinders or
fewer, so the problem becomes one of setting up the BIOS (or extended
BIOS) to account for the large disk.  By the way, I believe that the
8 GB limit that you are thinking about is the maximum size of a single
disk partition, not the maximum size of the disk.

>Would this 8 GB limit go away if we 
>had SCSI drives instead of IDE, or is it built  in to the intel version?

It is not a function of IDE vs SCSI disks.  It is a archaic holdover
from DOS days and how disks were originally treated (and how large
they were expected to become).

>Hope you have a pleasant holiday weekend.

You too.

Tom