From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Jan 25 09:50:35 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C908E16A4CE for ; Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:50:35 +0000 (GMT) Received: from vs3.bgnett.no (vs3.bgnett.no [194.54.96.185]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D529543D45 for ; Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:50:34 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from peter@bgnett.no) Received: from amidala.datadok.no.bgnett.no (amidala.datadok.no [194.54.103.98]) by vs3.bgnett.no (8.12.9p2/8.12.9) with ESMTP id j0P9oJ5n048175 for ; Tue, 25 Jan 2005 10:50:20 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from peter@bgnett.no) Sender: peter@amidala.datadok.no To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org References: From: peter@bgnett.no (Peter N. M. Hansteen) Date: 25 Jan 2005 10:49:39 +0100 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <86hdl57s98.fsf@amidala.datadok.no> Lines: 58 User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-bgnett.no-virusscanner: Found to be clean X-Envelope-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Partition Size X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:50:35 -0000 Danny writes: > On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 21:03:17 -0500, Peterhin wrote: > > I am going by what G. Lehey is suggesting in his book "The Complete > > FreeBSD" on pg. 70 he does not recommend a /usr, or a /var file system. > [...] > > What does he recommend then? Now that I have the chance to make you go and buy the book, maybe I should Actually Greg Lehey offers a well reasoned discussion of the pros and cons of various partitionings, arguing among other things that given the typical sizes of modern hard disks, partitions of even a few percent of a normal disk size is quite roomy compared to the requirements of a complete FreeBSD binaries+source+ports+your choice of packages installation. Consider also that in a home or personal system such as a laptop, your logs or other /var material isn't likely to grow unmanageably, and when it comes to swap, you need some, but swap much larger than system memory is not useful for crash dumps and if you swap that much, there are other problems. For a home or personal system, you really only need /, swap and /home. So with this advice in mind, consider my reasonably modern laptop, which came with a gigabyte of RAM and a hard disk advertised as 80GB but actually per dmesg ad0: 76319MB [155061/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA33 After gazing into thin air until my wife positively started blushing, I ended up partitioning like this: /dev/ads1a / 12GB /dev/ads1b swap 2GB /dev/ads1d /home "the rest" - 59GB according to df -h. 12GB for / is vastly more than you're likely to need. With base system, full 5.3 source and ports tree and my 452 most needed packages installed, my / has 6.6GB used (that is 62%). Again, this is for a home or personal system. If you are setting up a large server of some kind or other which will be running a lot of processes, the equations will turn out differently, and things like separate /tmp and /var partitions (or even disks) may start to make sense. The only real guide is experience from your typical use, or for that matter, from people who run rougly the same things you do. If you need a different configuration for what you want to do, symptoms will show up soon enough. -- Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ http://www.datadok.no/ http://www.nuug.no/ "First, we kill all the spammers" The Usenet Bard, "Twice-forwarded tales"