No DUMPDEV on a 3B15? (summary of responses)

[Stephen J. Friedl]

Hi folks,

     I recently posted a request asking how I can get rid of the
DUMPDEV on a 3B5/3B15 because I don't want a crash dump eating
some partition.  The general consensus is that there's no way to
avoid this but it can be worked around.  We took a spare
partition on the second drive, put /tmp on the low part, a second
swap area on the high part, and designated this as the dump
device.  This way if the system takes a crash dump nothing
"useful" will be eaten, plus we have a spare partition to use
when loading filesystem image tapes.  Most of the respondents
mentioned that having a spare partition was A Good Thing, as I've
found in the past.

    For those wondering about the crash dumps, there are indeed
conditions where the system will dump without me asking it to.
It is related to the auto-reboot feature, and when misconfigured
it will indeed take a dump.  See optreboot(8) for the gory
details.

     I got particularly good info from Brian Kantor and Steve
Losen, plus a few more messages that I can't find around
anymore ( sorry :-< ).

     Steve

-- 
Steve Friedl    V-Systems, Inc.  +1 714 545 6442    3B2-kind-of-guy
friedl at vsi.com     {backbones}!vsi.com!friedl    attmail!vsi!friedl
---------Nancy Reagan on the Three Stooges: "Just say Moe"---------