I upgraded to libc6 and hamm this weekend... and had my entire root partition flagged "readonly" by an unknown mechanism. This got me cursing and thinking....[1]
Ideally the issue should never come up, but hard disks fail. Hard disks are replaced as hardware is upgraded. Occasionally things get totally hosed when you push the edge. The information maintained in dpkg (theoretically) specifies the contents of the file system except for /etc, /var, /usr/local, and /home. Furthermore, many (even most?) people won't do anything too fancy with /etc, /var or /usr/local, especially if any servers (e.g., web and ftp) use /home instead of /var for their data files. This suggests that it may make sense to recommend that the default disk configuration is three partitions, not two: / (existing) /home (new) (swap) (existing) since even if the system must be reinstalled from original media, the user won't lose their personal files (although they may lose some mail). Taking this a step further, a fixed-size /var partition could be specified with the expectation that it will maintain status logs even after a reinstallation. Setting up two ext2fs partitions instead of one is a bit of a pain... but nothing compared to the hassles if the disk is set up as one big partition when something goes wrong. Should the installation script be modified to suggest multiple partitions? Bear Giles [EMAIL PROTECTED] [1] I don't why my system always reboots in "read-only" mode now; since I can't log in I have little information. It's not a problem with the partition table, lilo configuration, or /etc/fstab. Also, I can boot off a different partition on the same disk (although it is still 1.3). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
