SUMMARY: boot problems with /var

First let me thank:

Mike Bruno 
McClark
Darren Dunham
Tim Villa 
SreenivasaRao Vadalasetty 
SteinAxt 
Dominic Clarke 
German, Vinnie 
Williams, Mario 
Michael Schulte
Mark Andrews 
AP 

for responding to my question. Many of them said the problem is /var
needs to be mounted much before the other file partitions like /space is
mounted but I am trying to create a var directory on /space and make a
symbolic from /var to /space/var by which var is not accessible until
/space is mounted. One way to overcome this problem is to make /space
mount much before anything else is mounted but it may cause some
problems.

Some said make a partition for /var from /space so that /var can be
mounted without any dependencies. But the way I did was changing the
name of /space to /var. That way /var is instantly available and I can
make use of the the disk space on /var for storing any other indexes by
making symbolic links. Once again I want to thank all the people for
their valuable suggestions.

My original question was:

I have a solaris 2.6 Ultra Enterprise 2 box with a couple of internal
disks and an external disk set. As /var keeps growing, I decided to make
use of the external disks. I raided and created file system and mounted
the meta device on /space. Now I created a directory called var on
/space and copied all the contents of /var onto /space/var in single
user mode. Renamed /var to /var.old and made a soft link from /space/var
to var on /. But for some reason when I reboot the machine after these
changes I get the following error:

INIT: Cannot create /var/adm/utmp or
/var/adm/utmpx                                                                                                             INIT: failed write of utmpx entry:"  "                                                                                                                          INIT: failed write of utmpx entry:"  "                                                                                                                          INIT: SINGLE USER MODE                                                                                                                                          Type Ctrl-d to proceed with normal startup,
(or give root password for system maintenance): 

I double checked to make sure that /space has rw permissions, I used the
-p option to copy with permissions but still I am unable to understand
why the system is unable to access the var link on /. Any idea where I
am making a mistake? Any suggestions? I will summarize the solution. I
am able to boot once I revert back to the inital settings without any
fsck problems.

Aravind
_______________________________________________
sunmanagers mailing list
sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers