New Messages

From: Louis Avrami <avramil@concentric.net>

Hi,

I had previously purchased a Sys Admin CD-ROM, and I'll be purchasing the new update. I have a bunch of old Sys Admin magazines that I would hate to throw away. There's still some useful information in all of the issues.

Would you know of an organization where I could donate these old issues? They really shouldn't go to waste.

Thanks,
Lou Avrami

Lou,

Thank you very much for writing. It's always nice to hear from a long-time reader. We suggest donating your old magazines to a high school library or local college computer science department.

We appreciate your time and your support of the magazine.

Amber Ankerholz

Dear Henry,

I'm writing to inform you of a significant error you have published in your article in this month's Sys Admin magazine in your article titled "Review of Current File Systems and Volume Managers".

In the section under Solaris File Systems you list VxFS/SANPOINT Control. This is very inaccurate. SanPointControl, or SPC as we call it, is a Fibre Channel device management tool, which allows you to manage all the devices on your SAN from one management console (provided the proper firmware, etc).

What you wanted to reference was SanPoint Foundation Suite. We commonly refer to the combination of VxVM and VxFS as the Foundation Suite, as they are so tightly integrated (though completely independent). As such, with the advent of our Cluster Server solution, we used the proprietary protocols that are used for VCS (Veritas Cluster Server) to provide a framework where VxVM and VxFS can share file and volume locking information, which leads us to the Cluster Volume Manager and Cluster File System (which are NOT independent) in the product we refer to as SanPoint Foundation Suite. A further correction is that this product is only available on Solaris at this time.

Regards,
John Gibson
Senior Consultant
Veritas Software Enterprise Consulting Services

John,

Thanks for writing. I do not know what I was thinking, but you are 100% correct. I kept using the wrong term and darn if I did not know what was correct in the first place. I am very sorry and will ask the editor to correct the online version.

Regards,
Henry Newman <hsn@hsnewman.com>

I am an Apple Macintosh user. I use MacOS 10.2.3/Darwin.

I see nothing about MY UNIX in your magazine. If you ever include us Darwin users, unwanted as we seem to be with you, I will subscribe to your magazine. No, I am not talking about the random article, I mean regular articles like you have for Linux/SVR4 and the like. If I am wrong, show me.

Mark Fernandez

Mark,

Thank you for writing to Sys Admin. As you are probably aware, the articles in Sys Admin come solely from freelancers. We run a call for papers on general topics every month, such as "Security" and "Networking", and we choose articles from the proposals that we receive. We'd love to run more articles about MacOS, but we receive very few Mac-related proposals.

Would you be interested in writing an article for the magazine? If so, please let me know. Or perhaps you could pass the information to your colleagues that we're always looking for good contributed articles.

I appreciate your feedback and hope to hear from you. Thanks for your time and your interest in the magazine.

Amber Ankerholz

Dear Matt,

Sorry to bug you. But I was puzzled by one part of your article and I was hoping you could straighten me out. For the record I haven't had reason to use soft partitions yet, but that might change in the future, so I'm trying to keep up to date on this.

On page 20 of the article, you show how to create soft partitions on a physical drive. I guess I'm a little confused by the results of the metastat command. It shows that the d112 soft partition starts at block 12582915 where the d111 soft partition started at block 20971522. I had figured that the starting blocks for each soft partition would sequentially increase. Is that wrong and if so why?

Thanx for your time,
Stuart

Hi Stuart,

You are correct. Good catch! Here is what the metastat should have looked like:

# metastat
d110: Soft Partition
    Component: c3t0d0s0
    State: Okay
    Size: 20971520 blocks
        Extent              Start Block              Block count
             0                        1                 20971520
d111: Soft Partition
    Component: c3t0d0s0
    State: Okay
    Size: 10485760 blocks
        Extent              Start Block              Block count
             0                 20971522                 10485760
d112: Soft Partition
    Component: c3t0d0s0
    State: Okay
    Size: 31457280 blocks
        Extent              Start Block              Block count
             0                 31457283                 31457280

Matthew Cheek
Systems Analyst IV
cheek@mars-systems.com