To Merge or not to Merge.:: Merging partitions, for cd building.

[Ronny Aasen <ronny@skolelinux.no>]

Greetings

For historical reasons, the partition layout on administrator.s.n is a
bit overly complex.
The result of this complexity is that we can not use hardlinking when
building cd's something that waste a lot of space, and uses a lot of
extra time for building, to copy files around.

With the recent deployment of the ataboy2, donated by usit. space is no
longer a issue.

My primary suggestion is to merge partitions together into larger
volumes. the partitions to merge are all the areas required for cd
building. debmirror, ftparchive (for our local repo) and temp_storage
we can also consider merge the 4 home area's into a single one. but
that's not a requirement for cd building. And i will not focus on this now.
the need for temp_storage with hardlinks will be almost nonexsistent. So
this will save us about 25GB anyway. And using hardlinking should mean
faster builds. reducing the problem where people rsync a image while
it's building.


My secondary solution if the primary one is unacceptable for any reason.
is to simply rsync, before the builds, all the requiered bits into a
huge area  and build the images in there. we have the space for it but
it's ineffective and a bit pointless.


I will do this work in a few days unless there are sufficient strong
reasons not to.

Comments please.
Ronny Aasen