Ultrix == Unix

[Patrick Barron]

In article <5533 at swan.ulowell.edu> page at swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page) writes:
>Are on-disk partition tables that important?  How often do you
>change your partitions?

On-disk partition tables are VERY important for us, since we have a
whole lot of third-party MSCP disks with different sizes.  Without
being able to change the partition tables, we'd have to have a different
version of the kernel (with the partition tables hacked up in uda.c
the right way) for each hardware configuration.  And if you have a
machine with disks from any two different vendors at the same time,
well, you lose, since the device driver can only store one partition
table at a time in the device driver for each different kind of disk.
(Yes, I know that the *real* bug is that our Maxtor disks and our Fujitsu
disks both identify themselves as RA80's...)   And, of course, if you're
a binary-only site, you lose again, since you couldn't fix it even if
you knew how.

--Pat.