[15508] in Athena Bugs
sun4 8.1.10: /var/rtmp does not exist on the root partition
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Tue Sep 16 02:52:30 1997
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 1997 02:52:25 -0400
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
Cc: mhpower@MIT.EDU
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
During conformance testing of a statically linked (with the
exception of /etc/lib/ld.so) version of Cornell tcsh, we
observed a problem with the handling of /tmp.
The problem manifests as /tmp not being writable when
the root partition is mounted read-write.
This is because /tmp is a symlink to /var/rtmp, but /var/rtmp
is not writable when root is not mounted, as does not exist
as a directory on the root partition:
[bobbi-harlow!jhawk] /etc# fsdb `mount | awk '$1=="/"{print $3}'`
fsdb of /dev/dsk/c0t3d0s0 (Read only) -- last mounted on /
fs_clean is currently set to FSACTIVE
fs_state consistent (fs_clean CAN be trusted)
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s0 > :ls /
/:
./ afs/ export/ mnt/ tmp@
../ bin@ floppy/ opt@ usr/
.cshrc cdrom/ home/ os@ var/
.klogin core@ kernel/ platform/ vol/
.login dev/ lib@ proc/
.profile devices/ lost+found/ sbin/
.xsession* etc/ mit/ srvd@
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s0 > :ls /var
/var:
./ ../
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s0 >
The right solution here is to create /var/rtmp on the root partition,
but I'm not sure how this should happen.
Perhaps /etc/rcS.d/S90mid-update could be installed and utilized for
this function.
The truly enterprising might try using fsdb, but this seems likely
a good way to fail catastrophically.
--jhawk
