Fdisk and filesystems

[Rick Stevens]

On Fri, 2008-02-08 at 09:37 -0600, Esquivel, Vicente wrote:
> Can anyone tell me if it is a must that you do fdisk on a newly
> presented  SAN lun or can you skip that step and just create the file
> system on the entire lun device using "mkfs -t ext3", on a linux
> server?

It isn't absolutely necessary.  You must use fdisk if you want to create
and use partitions on the SAN volume (e.g. "mke2fs -j /dev/sdx1").  If
you intend to use the whole thing you can put the filesystem on the
device (e.g. "mke2fs -j /dev/sdx") and there's no need for fdisk.

I might recommend you label the filesystem as well (use the "-L name"
option).

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- Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer             rstevens at internap.com -
- CDN Systems, Internap, Inc.                http://www.internap.com -
-                                                                    -
-                 All generalizations are false.                     -
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