How to Use This Guide

How to Use This Guide

IRIX Admin: Disks and Filesystems is written for system administrators and other knowledgeable IRIX users who need to perform administration tasks on their disks, filesystems, and logical volumes. It provides command line procedures for performing administration tasks; these tasks are most relevant to administering servers and workstations with many disks. Simple disk and filesystem administration using the graphical user interface provided by the Disk Manager is described in the Personal System Administration Guide.

This guide can be used by any user with a basic knowledge of IRIX to learn about and perform basic disk and filesystem administration procedures. However, some procedures in this guide can result in loss of files on the system if the procedures are not performed correctly. They should be attempted only by people who are:

familiar with IRIX filesystem administration procedures
experienced in disk repartitioning using fx
comfortable performing administration tasks from the shell in the miniroot environment provided by inst
familiar with filesystem backup concepts and procedures, particularly using dump

A Caution paragraph appears at the beginning of each procedure that should be performed only by knowledgeable administrators. To learn more about system administration, see the guide IRIX Admin: System Configuration and Operation.

The features described in this guide are included in IRIX system software releases beginning with the IRIX 6.2 release. However, to use several features, you must obtain Network License System(TM) (NetLS(TM)) licenses by purchasing separate software options. The features that require NetLS licenses are:

The plexing feature of the XLV Volume Manager, which provides mirroring of disks up to four copies. This feature is provided by the Disk Plexing Option software option.
Guaranteed-rate I/O. Guaranteed-rate I/O (GRIO) is a feature of IRIX that enables an application to request a fixed I/O rate and, if granted, be assured of receiving that rate. By default, the system allows four Guaranteed-rate I/O streams. To obtain up to 40 streams, you must purchase the High Performance Guaranteed-Rate I/O--5-40 Streams software option. An unlimited number of streams is provided by the High Performance Guaranteed-Rate I/O--Unlimited Streams software option.