Date: Wed, 3 May 00 22:52:46 +0100 From: fcfbsd <fcfbsd@eircom.net> To: "Allen" <soundbyte@sound-by-design.com>, "FreeBSD Organisation" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Pratt missing Message-ID: <E12n71e-0003s9-00@kang.tinet.ie>
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Not really a good subject line if you don't mind me saying. I've made
some comments below.
-----Original Message-----
>card, one 345 meg and two 200 meg and I have two extra 200 meg drives
>available as well as an older (1996) Panasonic SCSI CDROM.
>
>What I don't comprehend is how to split the install over the drives to
>best utilize the space available.
When you run the format utility from the install you can change the
options for each drive independantly. (more about that below)
>
>The other question is about creating the boot floppies. Since I can not
>access the BSDi, should I make the floppies on my W95 machine?
Yup.
>
>How should/do I partition/format the drives? I do not want any messdos
>on the machine if possible.
When the format utility runs there is an option to select the whole disk.
This will give a warning telling you that your about to commit your
machine to only FreeBSD you just cancel the warning & continue. (again
this should become clearer if you read the end)
>
>Second:
>
>Now I know this is a limitation of my understanding and background, but
>I can not find a GOOD explaination of the relationship of
>drives/partitions/slices to the *nix file structure.
>
>To me one has a filing cabinet with multiple . . .
> . . . make it seem as though there is no direct
>connection between the directories and that each could be on it's own
>drive/slice in any order whatsoever.
Forget the filing cabinet analogy I went throught the same transition -
it doesn't fit. For Unix the best principle of understanding is (in my
experience) - try to understand the operating system then relate that to
the hardware. Due to the simplicity of DOS structure the reverse works
OK in that environment.
This is my best shot, hopefully someone can point you to better
documentation or clarify/correct/confirm this stuff. I've deliberately
left out details & variations to keep this mail at a reasonable length.
-----
You have to do two things. You have to format your disks to create some
partitions, these partitions will be the FreeBSD file systems & are
analogous (damn I can't spell) to DOS partitions, or more accurately IBM
PC-Compatible partitions. These are not really relevant to Unix systems
& if you use the 'a' (all) option in the format utililty it will commit
your whole disk to FreeBSD. You will have to do this for each disk.
After this you have to slice up your disks. This is done with the label
utility (I'm not sure why FreeBSD calls it labelling). This creates the
the slices that the system actually uses. These are logically similar to
partitions. Each slice is an independently operating file system you
have to decide how much space to allocate to each section - enter
theology -
hmmmmmm . . . just take the defaults. No, that is not useful advice but
if you look up the mail track for;
"BSD Theology: swap, /var, /tmp and /usr/tmp"
in the mail-list then there are plenty of offerings on how to set up your
system.
Your biggest problem is going to be ensuring that you have enough /usr
space (without getting into logical spanning paritions). I would
recommend that you commit you largest disk to that purpose & do a fairly
small installation. Use one of the smaller disks as your primary (which
ever id you system is configured to boot from). You can then add
addtional slices from other disks into mount points on that file system.
I wouldn't worry about understanding or drawing any analogy with filing
cabinets that will come once you get use to it.
OK, neck on the line. Create a root slice (letter - 'a' : mount point -
'/') of about 80Mb on one of your 200Mb disks. Ensure this is your
primary boot device (not absolutely necessary but common & consequently
convenient). Create a swap slice (letter - 'b' : no mount point) of
about (oh, no) 2 times the amount of memory on the system. Put this on
the same disk as your root slice. Create a user slice (letter - 'f' :
mount point - '/usr') & commit all of your 345Mb disk to this.
Note : root and user file systems are UFS & the swap is a special 'swap'
file system.
This should allow you to get the system up & running. At that point you
can start to mess with new slices & mounting them at different points in
the file system in a way that suits you. Remember to do a small install
'cause if you do a complete one then the /usr filesystem (your 345Mb
disk) will fill up & cause you no end of hassle. You can always add the
other stuff later using sysinstall when you have the other disk/slices
layed out.
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