TABLE OF CONTENTS If you don't ask the right questions, you don't get the right answers. A question asked in the right way often points to its own answer. Asking questions is the ABC of diagnosis. Only the inquiring mind solves problems.
Edward Hodnett
In this chapter, we begin our discussion of the file system layer of the I/O subsystem. As before, our goal is to give you a flavor for the kinds of issues you are likely to run into and some strategies for dealing with them. There are books devoted exclusively to the topic of file systems, and we refer you to those and to the Tru64 UNIX documentation for exhaustive coverage of all the options associated with a particular command. Within this book, we will attempt to give you as much information as we can to head off problems that crop up in the area of file systems.
We'll begin with generic file system problems. These are the kinds of problems that can arise no matter what type of file system is involved. Later in the chapter we discuss issues specific to particular types of file system (e.g., AdvFS or UFS).
One of the most common of all file system issues and one that almost every UNIX system administrator runs into eventually is a full file system. Appropriate planning can make this much less likely to happen, so we believe that a proactive approach is the best way to deal with this...
