Date: Tue, 2 May 2000 21:03:28 -0700 (PDT) From: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: Peter McGarvey <Peter.McGarvey@telinco.net>, FREEBSD-Questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: BSD Theology: swap, /var, /tmp and /usr/tmp Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10005022040001.24067-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> In-Reply-To: <20000503124705.E8284@freebie.lemis.com>
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On Wed, 3 May 2000, Greg Lehey wrote: > So, what's the right thing to do? I've always been a proponent of "/, > swap and /usr", but lately I've been rethinking. [....] > > With these considerations in mind, I installed a new system > yesterday. This is a 750MHz Athlon with 256 MB of memory. The disk > is a 20GB ata. This is how I partitioned: > > # df > Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on > /dev/ad0s1a 1984 738 1087 40% / > /dev/ad0s1e 16490 640 14531 4% /home > # pstat -s > Device 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Type > /dev/ad0s1b 511 0 511 0% Interleaved > > In other words, the *entire* system, including /usr, is now in the > root file system. There's not much in there which I write; /var is a > link to /home/var, and /tmp will be (isn't quite yet) mfs. Mainly, > /usr is just an extension of the system files, and has no user files > in there at all. Everything that gets worked on is in /home. > > What about the sizes? I don't know yet. I've decided I have to move > /usr/src and /usr/obj to /home, since a lot of writing takes place > there, but I think that the main increase in size will come from > additional packages installed in /usr/local. Even then, I expect /usr > to end up with a significant amount of space left over. > > I'd be interested in any comments people have. Please remember to > trim away the irrelevant parts of the reply. Lately I've been making /usr/local a separate slice, so that if I wanted to reinstall instead of going through, say, 3.4-4.0 stuff, I'd keep installed third-party software and /usr/local/home. And have a place to stash configuration files, a copy of /etc, and so forth. What increases the size of /usr is then /usr/X11R6, which also gets a lot of installed software. I'm also trying to separate what a) doesn't grow much and b) can be easily reinstalled (the system, sources, ports, cvsrepo) from what needs to be backed up in one way or another or irretrievably lost with a crash. The space needed by /var is, uh, variable--space for the mail spool would vary with the number of users getting mail; the space needed by var is also a function of the databases kept there. The biggest standard one is the locate database, which seems to take a little under 1 percent of the file space being indexed. The biggest non-standard one (which presumably ought to be moved off-site) is a tripwire database, which can be pretty big if you don't configure tripwire. And logs of course vary, and if you want to keep old logs to analyze ftp or httpd records, you need some space in var or some place to stash them. Annelise To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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