From owner-freebsd-questions Tue May 2 22:37:46 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from fedde.littleton.co.us (fedde.littleton.co.us [216.17.174.44]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B5D7F37B5F0 for ; Tue, 2 May 2000 22:37:40 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cfedde@fedde.littleton.co.us) Received: from fedde.littleton.co.us (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by fedde.littleton.co.us (8.10.0/8.10.0) with ESMTP id e435ahr18663; Tue, 2 May 2000 23:36:43 -0600 (MDT) Message-Id: <200005030536.e435ahr18663@fedde.littleton.co.us> To: Annelise Anderson Cc: Greg Lehey , Peter McGarvey , FREEBSD-Questions Subject: Re: BSD Theology: swap, /var, /tmp and /usr/tmp In-Reply-To: From: Chris Fedde Date: Tue, 02 May 2000 23:36:43 -0600 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 2 May 2000 21:03:28 -0700 (PDT) Annelise Anderson wrote: +------------------ | 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. | | 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. +------------------ Just thought that it was time to chime in again. Maybe another point of view on hierarchy and disk control might be usefull. I've been evolving a multi layer system over the last several years. The current version is a two layer scheme that goes something like this. The first layer represents the traditional core unix hierarchy. I set this up much as has been described on this thread. I create mount points for /, /var, /usr, /tmp that are much as the installer wants to default them, One major exception is that I limit /usr to about a gig or so. The remainder of the disk remains un-allocated. The second layer is for "non install time" stuff. I have mount points for all the other partitions at /disk/0, /disk/1, and so on to create a "disk farm". When we all used 2 gig disks these were typically a partition g configured as the whole drive but now with 18Gig disks becoming common place I might make two or more partitions on a single slice. I then use symbolic links to map specific directories into these mount points. For example if we expect that the system will want to retain lots of logging data I simply create a directory /disk/5/var.log and make a symbolic link at /var/log that points into this directory. Home directories are all in /home which is a symbolic link to something like /disk/2/home. Or if I need finer control /home might be a directory containing multiple symbolic links into other places. /home/cfedde -> /disk/4/home.cfedde /home/joel -> /disk/3/home.joel The main beauty of this scheme is that it now becomes easy to re-locate big hierarchies as the use of the system changes. Simply create a directory in one of the farm disks and move the hierarchy there. Then set up the link and blow away the old directory: kill `head -1 /var/run/sendmail.pid` mkdir /disk/1/var.spool.mqueue cd /var/spool/mqueue pax -rwvpe * /disk/1/var.spool.mqueue cd .. mv /var/spool/mqueue /var/spool/mqueue- ln -s /disk/1/var.spool.mqueue /var/spool/mqueue /usr/sbin/sendmail -bd -q30m rm -fr /var/spool/mqueue- chris -- Chris Fedde 303 773 9134 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message