From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Feb 7 2:39:11 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from ipamzlx.physik.uni-mainz.de (ipamzlx.Physik.Uni-Mainz.DE [134.93.180.54]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 79D8937B401 for ; Wed, 7 Feb 2001 02:38:53 -0800 (PST) Received: from ipamzlx.Physik.Uni-Mainz.DE (ipamzlx.Physik.Uni-Mainz.DE [134.93.180.54]) by ipamzlx.physik.uni-mainz.de (8.11.2/8.11.2) with ESMTP id f17AdWS49412 for ; Wed, 7 Feb 2001 11:39:35 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from ohartman@ipamzlx.physik.uni-mainz.de) Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 11:39:32 +0100 (CET) From: "O. Hartmann" To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Some conceptional questions about partition size Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Dear Sirs. In many aspects it seems a good idea to use a lot of partitions. Traditionally, I use for each of the following filesystems a dedicated partition: / /var /compat /usr and /usr/local. For the NFS exportable user's home I use separate partitions and due to NFS and exporting partitions I use /usr/local as a seprate partition. In some aspects of security, backup and restoring a truncated filesystem it has revealed to be on a "good path of doing well" using partitions, but at the moment I run into some kind of problems, especially with /var. We do not use a dedicated mailing service, sendmail is udefull for our purposes. As I saw in the past, many system relevant informations are stored away in /var, printing, some system's databases and especially /var/tmp. At this moment, I use a 2GB partition to keep all this informations, but I ran into problems when users did big print jobs which are spooled and gzip.tar'ing files. My question is: what is a reasonable size for /var? My thought is: to keep system's requirements completely different from users requiremnets. I can not figure out how to separate /tmp (is a link to /var/tmp in my configuration) for the system completely from the user's /tmp. As I know, in case of emergency/crashes or other bad situations FreeBSD need some essential partitions on the boot device. As we move now toward a RAID, several aspects shown above become irrelevant/obsolet. So, my question for that is: is it a good task to "melt together" all system's directories together into a big partition, say, mounted as / ? Linux seems to do the same way this task, but in many aspects I'm not familiar with Linux' way of doing jobs and it seems that this very often aspects of security, if there are really some, are not been payed attention of (English for the impatient, sorry ...). Thanks for your comments and tips ... Oliver -- MfG O. Hartmann ohartman@mail.physik.uni-mainz.de ---------------------------------------------------------------- IT-Administration des Institut fuer Physik der Atmosphaere (IPA) ---------------------------------------------------------------- Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz Becherweg 21 55099 Mainz Tel: +496131/3924662 (Maschinensaal) Tel: +496131/3924144 FAX: +496131/3923532 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message