8.2.2p5 questions

G. Roderick Singleton gsingleton at home.com
Sat Jan 8 02:33:29 UTC 2000


Joseph S D Yao wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Jan 05, 2000 at 11:57:22PM +0000, G. Roderick Singleton wrote:
> > You have a strange Solaris 2.x setup. Out of the box Solaris uses
> > free memory as swap and in turn makes /tmp a tmpfs filesystem
> > using what it scavanged from freemem.  For example, /etc/vfstab
> > has the following line:
> >
> > swap  -       /tmp    tmpfs   -       yes     -
> 
> Exactly right.  Now let me ask you, how would you like a user to be
> able to deny you the ability to run a large program, or otherwise
> swapbind your system, by making a huge temporary file?  I don't
> consider this change that Sun made the smartest thing it ever did.
> 

That's beside the point.  This user had failures writing to /tmp
My point was that unless he specifically created other swap
areas, e.g. disk or file, Solaris will only scavange free memory.
With 1Gb of RAM this is reasonable but I like to cover my butt by
adding a disk partition or two so that I have at least space for
one copy of all my RAM for memory under 512Mb. Call me old fashioned but
I have never ran out of room in /tmp by doing so.
/var/tmp, yes. But that's another story.

> > Now if you have changed any of these on your systems, good but the
> > user doesn't have your depth of knowledge and thus could easily be
> > misled.
> 
> Well, the same is true of what you had said.  ;-)  I tend to allow for
> other people's changing things.  I suppose partly because I do.
> 

OF COURSE! Be creative, we should all do that. 

To attempt to clarify the discussion for Mimsosa, if he's still
following this thread, both Joe and I have tried to say that you've too
little tmp and with Solaris, /tmp is built from swap space unless you've
made changes during install. In fact, Solaris
can operate with swap consisting entirely of unallocated RAM.

You should check the state of your swap.  swap -s will tell you
your swap usage including free memory. swap -l will tell you what
status of all swap areas except free memory. For example,
%[349] swap -l
swapfile             dev  swaplo blocks   free
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s1   32,25      8 411256 299968
/dev/dsk/c0t2d0s1   32,17      8 410392 294432
%[350] swap -s
total: 126488k bytes allocated + 18036k reserved = 144524k used, 330916k
available

and lastly

%[353] df -k /tmp
Filesystem            kbytes    used   avail capacity  Mounted on
swap                  330388    1464  328924     1%    /tmp

 
> --
> Joe Yao                         jsdy at cospo.osis.gov - Joseph S. D. Yao
> COSPO/OSIS Computer Support                                     EMT-B
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> This message is not an official statement of COSPO policies.

ger
-- 
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G. Roderick Singleton, <gsingleton at home.com> PATH tech,
71 Underhill Drive, Unit 159, Toronto, ON  M3A 2J8
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