From: junio@twinsun.com (Jun Hamano) Subject: Re: Question and Observations Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 22:16:24 GMT
Marc G Fournier <marcf@nexus.yorku.ca> asks a couple of questions
and comments in <marcf.725558783@yorku.ca>.
As to passwd expiration problem, read manual page of `passwd' and
find how to use `-x' option.
About mkfs `-i'. It doesn't affect the blocksize. Traditional
unix filesystem (and MINIX filesystem linux uses) allocates
storage for inode area and blocks when the filesystem is
initialized, and mkfs have to figure out how many inodes it needs
to allocate for the filesystem being created. The ideal
configuration is that you run out inodes and block storage space
at the same time; otherwise either one of these would be wasted.
If you expect you will have a lot of small files, then give
smaller value to `-i' option so that you won't run out of inodes
before you run out of disk space.
About your `gripes' section; I too have the same feeling about
SLS distribution, but this is certainly _not_ the problem with
linux itself. We should send bug-reports and suggestions to
people (person?) at SoftLanding so that the next release will
have more reasonable configuration. From what I've seen in
c.o.l, about 30% of newbee questions and gripes wouldn't have
been posted in the first place if SLS release did things right
(e.g. "/etc/passwd not being readable by everybody" comes to
mind). It is a trivial, but a tad tedious task to fix all the
ownership and permission bits and such, but SLS release has so
much influence to those naive linux users with little or no unix
experience, we should urge and help SLS to provide more
reasonable and easy to manage system configuration. I think it
would benefit us, too; we wouldn't have to be bothered by trivial
questions every time somebody finds out his users get error
message from `who' command, for example.