In setting up my Xserve I chose to create 3 different partitions:
1) System
2) Everything which is more or less dynamic
3) User data
Sounds like you're a sysadmin from Linux or another unice.
To prevent that I end up with an unbootable system, or corrupted
plist-files with a full system disk I want to move everything that
"grows" (such as swapfiles, logfiles, mail spool directories, temp
dir etc.) to a second partition.
This is ill-advised. Certain performance enhancements in the
filesystem favor the boot volume.
The dynamic pager has become better and better and should never use
up all available disk space. You can configure other programs and
system components to use disk space on other volumes rather than / or
/var, et al.
As for moving user HOMEs, you can do this by just specifying the
location when creating the accounts, you don't need to move /Users to
do this.
Starting with swapfiles, I noticed that if I change to location of
the swapdie in /etc/rc just the system volume is mounted and
therefore I cannot select a different location.
This is correct. But you should never be editing /etc/rc. Your
changes will get clobbered, and even Apple is moving from /etc/rc so
this is clearly not the right place.
Is there any reason why the virtual memory is initialised before all
drives are mounted?
Yes. We need to have VM running to perform the rest of system
initialization. You can also stop the dynamic pager or add another.
Will I get myself into a lot of trouble when I mount the volumes
earlier in the boot process (or delay the initialisation of the
dynamic_pager until after my second partition is mounted?
Yes. Not to mention you'll need to have VM running for disk arbitration.
Also, it appears that on a clean install of Tiger, the /etc/fstab is
no longer existing.
Yes, so? Remember if a unix system doesn't diviate from the defaults
for whatever it is that a config file isn't needed.
Then, in /System/Library/StartupItems/Disks I find a script that
uses /sbin/autodiskmount -va, but autodiskmount is deprecated
according to it's man page.
Users/sysadmins should probably use diskutil instead, yes.
Altogether I am a bit confused when and where the non-system volumes
are mounted?
Volumes are automatically mounted when available in OS X, you don't
need to do anything, if they are online the system will load kernel
extensions necessary to support them and any initialization, and it
will all "just work."
Any hints (or pointers to documentation or websites describing this
kind of stuff) are welcome!
You probably want "Mac OS X [Panther|Tiger] for Unix Geeks" from O'Reilly.
You probably also need to read the developer docs.
--
-dhan
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Shoop AIM: iWiring
Systems & Networks Architect http://www.iwiring.net/
email@hidden http://www.ustsvs.com/
iWiring provides systems and networks support for Mac OS X, unix, and
Open Source application technologies & offers 24x7 operations with annual
support starting for less than the cost of a copy of Tiger Server.
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