Comment 9 for bug 18661
Revision history for this message
| gwern (gwern0) wrote Re: Temporary /tmp and /var/tmp | #9 |
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1b1ed1a
(Get the code!)
I actually ran into a situation where a ramfs /tmp would have been an absolute life-saver. As it was, my experience was very unpleasant until I managed to wipe and reinstall Ubuntu.
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So I went and installed 8.04 on my desktop. It was fairly difficult as I was using a CD-ROM drive which is ancient and generally unrecognized by Linux livecds. But eventually with a little .iso and Grub hackery, I managed to install onto the normal 3 partitions - /, /home, and swap. And everything was good: I installed xmonad and zsh and basically got everything back up to speed. And I was pleased with the strides Ubuntu had made since I left it for Gentoo lo those many years ago.
And then 2 or 3 days ago, it rebooted while I was gone and got stuck. Some sort of disk error (if you are curious what the error looked like, see attached). And what does Ubuntu do by default when there are disk errors? It mounts / read-only. Now, the disk was perfectly alright more or less. I could still mount /home, / was still perfectly readable. The disk errors were pesky, but I am convinced it was the fault of some update (as those errors never manifested under Gentoo, but did on every boot of the now-corrupted Ubuntu install).
The *real* kicker here was that I could not even run X or do anything useful. Why? Because most big apps want to create stuff in /tmp, and /tmp is by default in /, and / was now determinedly read-only. OK, so I go to edit /etc/fstab. Whoops. It is read-only too! OK, so I go to unmount / and mount rw. Except... yes, / cannot be unmounted because it is busy! OK, so I go to use a livecd to edit fstab to remove this fscking ro thing - and then the CD-ROM drive thing I mentioned bit me.
I ordered a new DVD drive from Newegg which was having a sale, and it arrived today, and so I could reinstall. It has worked so far. (The disk error did not manifest again, further convincing me one of the updates was screwy.)
But the fundamental problem was that I was stuck in the console and could hardly do anything because /tmp was on-disk. Very unpleasant.