File system issues

[Ian Smith]

On Sun, 26 Oct 2014 22:22:48 +0100, Dominic Fandrey wrote:
 > On 26/10/2014 18:37, Ian Smith wrote:
 > > On Sun, 26 Oct 2014 09:27:15 +0100, Dominic Fandrey wrote:
 > >  > On 26/10/2014 07:36, Ian Smith wrote:
 > > 
 > >  > > But then, the general expectation that new users will want a linux-style 
 > >  > > single / directory - sure, fine for VM use - cruels the potential to use 
 > >  > > dump and restore anyway.  It's a bit sad that this is still outstanding.
 > >  > 
 > >  > You can use dump from anywhere in the file system by way of nullfs
 > >  > mounts.
 > > 
 > > Thanks Dominic, I wasn't aware of that.  Not that it makes up for not 
 > > being able to not newfs filesystems you want to keep, and in fstab, but 
 > > it's definitely worth exploring as a workaround.
 > 
 > I have to withdraw my statement. I thought I had done it before, but I
 > cannot get it to work. I suppose that leaves us with tar.

I spent some time exploring trying to dump a nullfs-mounted (copy of) 
/etc last night, to no avail.  I finally managed to make a snapshot of 
that with mksnap_ffs, mounted it as an md, but it turned out to be just 
a snapshot of / and not dumpable anyway.

tar is generally useful, especially with trees like /home where there 
tend not to be any hard-linked files, here anyway.  But I'd miss dump.

I learned some new things, but C wasn't one of them (sorry, Adrian :)

cheers, Ian