ugh.book

Disk Partitions and Backups 227

swapped out, no doubt). Spiffy. So I used that king of high perfor-

mance featureful debugging tools (adb) to goose maxslp up to some-

thing more appropriate (like 2,000,000,000). Damnit, if the system is

not out of memory, then it shouldn’t page or swap! Period!

Why doesn’t someone tell Sun that their workstations aren’t Vaxen

with 2MB of RAM, it’s not 1983, and there is absolutely nothing to

be gained by summarily paging out stuff that you don’t have to just

so you have a lot of empty memory lying around? What’s that, you

say? Oh, right, I forgot—Sun wants their brand new spiffy fast work-

stations to feel like a VAX 11/750 with 2MB of RAM and a load fac-

tor of 6. Nothing like nostalgia, is there?

feh.

Disk Partitions and Backups

Disk space management is a chore on all types of computer systems; on
Unix, it’s a Herculean task. Before loading Unix onto your disk, you must
decide upon a space allocation for each of Unix’s partitions. Unix pretends
your disk drive is a collection of smaller disks (each containing a complete
file system), as opposed to other systems like TOPS-20, which let you cre-
ate a larger logical disk out of a collection of smaller physical disks.

Every alleged feature of disk partitions is really there to mask some bug or
misdesign. For example, disk partitions allow you to dump or not dump
certain sections of the disk without needing to dump the whole disk. But
this “feature” is only needed because the dump program can only dump a
complete file system. Disk partitions are touted as hard disk quotas that
limit the amount of space a runaway process or user can use up before his
program halts. This “feature” masks a deficient file system that provides no
facilities for placing disk quota limits on directories or portions of a file
system.

These “features” engender further bugs and problems, which, not surpris-
ingly, require a sysadmin (and additional, recurring costs) to fix. Unix
commonly fails when a program or user fills up the /tmp directory, thus
causing most other processes that require temporary disk space to fail.
Most Unix programs don’t check whether writes to disk complete success-
fully; instead, they just proceed merrily along, writing your email to a full
disk. In comes the sysadmin, who “solves” the problem by rebooting the