After posting the first SUMMARY, a few more interesting comments came in.
They are summarized here:
1. From Birger.Wathne@vest.sdata.no
DiskSuite: I have used it quite a lot.
Pros: Good, stable package.
Cons: No utilities to check your metadevices automatically. I have some
scripts to do it. No utilities to utilize mirroring for doing on-line
backups. I have written one myself. It can get confused about which of the
mirrors is the 'good' one. If this happens, you are in for a lot of
trouble. Convincing DiskSuite that it's wrong is *not* an easy task...
2. From shandelm@jpmorgan.com
One more anomoly of OLDs is that the NFS clients will not show any
"avail" size in the output of df(1) greater than 2GB. I think you will
need to distribute the OLDs version of df to the NFS clients for them
to get accurate output. I've done this successfully on my workstation.
(In response to my statement that *nobody* had a bad word to say...)
3. Dan Strick of BellCore (dan@bellcore.com) said:
I would have said some bad words: it is a real pain to install and
maintain. For example, you have to run a special program to patch
evey kernel you build. The version I installed introduced
incompatibilities in the remote file locking protocols which
brought the server on which it was installed to its knees.
(In order to fix the problem, we had to replace the file locking
daemons on all the other file servers. I think the problem was
considered to be caused by a bug in the earlier implementations
of rpc.lockd, but the whole episode is characteristic of the
problems you run into when you blindly install software that
replaces significant parts of your OS.) There is also the
recurrent problem of being unable to upgrade your OS to the
most recent version because some crucial unbundled component
is not yet available for the new OS release.
If you don't need the mirrored disk drive facility, Online
Disksuite probably isn't worth the hassle.
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Thanks again to all, and this closes the book (from this reporter's
desk anyway) on the >2GB question..... translation: no more summaries.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:08:06 CDT