Lessons learned...

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Is there anything more annoying that getting your system completely built the way you want it (mail, dns & bind, apache, php, mysql, wordpress, stud + irc, jails for every daemon) and realizing the way it was partitioned from the start (not by you) is horrible and you need to do a complete reinstall in order to fix it?

Hrmph. :mad:

Of course, losing all your data if you didn't have a backup plan is more annoying but this is 2012! :cool:

I run a dedicated freebsd box.
/ is tiny (9 gigs, most of which is full).
/usr and /var are on /
/home is nearly 1 TB and only using 63 megs.

Ugh. I know what I'm doing this weekend.

Feel free to post similar lessons learned here. I'm a bit long in the tooth for this, but I have done similar in the past because I thought I could get by with what I had.

Johnboy1951

I guess I have been lucky in that when this has happened I have been able to 'remaster' my install, re-do the partitioning, and reinstall from the remaster.

Without that tool ('mylivecd' in PCLinuxOS) I would have had a lot of hassle.
Also it means I can easily keep 'snapshots' of the install and use them in case of disaster (HDD crash).
Great when changing PC too ...... just use the remaster to install on a different PC.

I also use a current remaster on a USB stick to carry my own personal install with me .... nothing better than booting into a familiar environment if the need arises.

ntlbell

don't do a make all in /usr/ports

laugh

When using this guy --> *, always make sure it's in the right place.

PrzemoF

I never played with *BSD, but can't you change partition size?

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PrzemoF wrote: »

I never played with *BSD, but can't you change partition size?

Yeah it's not certain to work properly and can lead to performance issues though.

I'll give it a go with gpart now and see how I get on.

humbert

I used dd to image my drive to a file on an external disk. Repartitioned, mounted the image from a live usb and used cp -a to put everything back and it worked fine. Boot partition was separate though.



My lesson is not to try and edit partition tables with windows tools. I'm not a windows hater but good god those things suck ass and finding partition start sectors is time consuming.

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I decided to backup and reinstall.

Reinstallation took 10 minutes including partitioning (ovh.ie rocks!).

Reinstating my backups will take longer, but this was worth it for sure.

Eliot Rosewater

Runing "# chmod 0777 /" is seemingly not a good idea.

Khannie

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

Runing "# chmod 0777 /" is seemingly not a good idea.

It's a hard lesson to learn......

humbert

Would be a horrible mess but would that break anything?

Eliot Rosewater

Once the permissions on some of the binaries governing the sudo command are changed (from 644 iirr) you can no longer use the sudo comand. Catch 22: you need sudo to change the permissions to 644; you need the permissions to be 644 to use sudo!

Could be worse, at least all the files are still there.

syklops

Don't run fsck on a mounted drive.

schrodinger

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

Runing "# chmod 0777 /" is seemingly not a good idea.

mtree is your friend

http://marc.info/?l=freebsd-questions&m=107550476912218&w=2

Dum_Dum

Original poster could have backed up /home and converted it into a ZFS pool (although you should use whole disks)

Say home was on /dev/ada0s1d:

umount /home
zpool create mypool /dev/ada0s1d

Home could be recreated

zfs create mypool/home
zfs set mountpoint=/home mypool/home

Use the rest of the space for your jails etc..

syklops

So you've gone out to the DC, you've reinstalled your machine, you've installed SSH, good job, time to go home. You get home, you can ping it but you can't SSH in. Why? 'Coz you forgot to tell iptables that port 22 should be open. So you have to go back out to the mother flipping DC to type one command.

Infuriating. :mad:

Khannie

Oh god. That is so horrible.

A moment for our fallen comrade.....

/bows head

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That is brutal.

LiamOSullivan

I've learned a lot of stupid things...

# rm -r /usr
is not the same as
# rm -r usr (don't ask...)

Compiling a kernel without support for your filesystems is a bad idea.

USE="doc" makes portage operate in circles.

Those are a few that come to mind...

mr kr0nik

Its generally a good idea to (I think anyway) to CVS some important directories like /etc. Realised this after mucking up some config files and not realising what had changed.