Large file systems

[Calvin Hayden]

> 
> I am a system manager at Materials Science Center, Cornell University,
> responsible for a Convex C210 system with 5 GB of disk.  Out of this, we
> would like to make about 3 GB of disk available for our users, on two
> partitions.
> 
> What I would like to know is if anyone has found problems with large
> partition sizes (up to 2 or 3 GB).  Any problems with utilities like dump,
> system administration difficulties with large partition sizes, and so on.
> Those persons we have talked to have no experience with this size of
> partition.
> 
> (For those of you who are wondering how I can be talking about a 2 or 3 GB
> partition size on disks smaller than this, Convex Unix allows striping
> across several disks to get partitions larger than a single disk.)
...

We have some file systems (Sys V r2 v2 on a VAX 8600) that are large, not 
as large as you are wanting, but still pseudolarge.  The largest is a
600MB file system located on one drive.  It takes up only 4 of the drives
8 partitions.   Unfortunately, we cant spread a file system across drives.
Problems... backups to 9 track tape (if thats what is used)
can be hell.  We're up to 4 full 2400 ft reels @ 6250bpi for a volcopy of 
this file system (operator just loves it :->)  Another problem... doing a
restore of the file system in the event of a hda failure(s).  This       
happened to me, on the above mentioned file system (too bad most *nix 
systems dont have online diags like VMS's, to let the admin know ahead
of time that there may be a problem ;->).  Takes a while to restore, and
then you have to worry about having a spare drive (or in your case drives)
to restore the file system to.  We were lucky, we had a spare drive for this
purpose, but while work was being done on the dead one, we had no spare
disk space for any further fs restorations.  Backups to cartridge tapes
would make this easier, but the later problem would still exist.
Hope this helps in some way.

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+ Calvin Hayden                  +
+ Texas Instr.                   +
+ UUCP:...mcnc!rti!tijc03!cgh018 + 
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