CS615A -- Aspects of System Administration

Partition Exercise

The objective of this exercise is for you familiarize yourself with the concepts of BIOS partitions and regular or extended partitions on different operating systems.

Boot an EC2 instance of NetBSD, FreeBSD, OmniOS, and Linux. For each instance:

• Run fdisk(8) and observe the output. How does it differ between the different OS?
• Create a 1GB volume and attach it to the instances. Partition that volume into two different BIOS partitions. Which tools do you use on each OS?
• Partition the volume into multiple OS partitions. Then create two different file systems.
• Experiment with the different mount options for the different file system types. What changes can you make, when would it make sense to use these options, what is the performance- or security impact of using them?