From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jun 13 14:36:35 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.the-i-pa.com (mail.the-i-pa.com [151.201.71.132]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 91D1D37B403 for ; Wed, 13 Jun 2001 14:36:29 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wmoran@iowna.com) Received: (qmail 8255 invoked from network); 13 Jun 2001 21:43:10 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO ws1) (151.201.71.146) by mail.the-i-pa.com with SMTP; 13 Jun 2001 21:43:10 -0000 Message-ID: <002501c0f452$c4e9dbd0$9247c997@ws1> From: "Bill Moran" To: , Subject: Re: Partioning recommendations for server with a lot of disk Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 17:49:49 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.5 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > Most the servers I've deployed over the past >couple of years I've built with just swap and /, and I really like the >simplicity of that. Perhaps I suffer some increased exposure to the >consequences of disk errors in this configuration, but the tradeoff with >never having to worry about a partition filling (before a disk fills) has, >to date, paid off. It is nice ... I occasionally use that same setup - but very little. Mainly on test boxes that will be redone later anyway. >However, with 50GB, I'm feeling less comfortable with the big / and nothing >else. Can anyone offer advice as to why I might prefer multiple partitions >instead of one big one (or vice-versa)? I can tell you a story ... I have a backup server I installed for a client. It has /, /usr, /var, swap and /data partitions. The data partition is the staging area where most disk activity occurs. A week ago, for some unknown reason, the /data partition became corrupt, and I was able to fix the problem by simply unmounting it, re-newfsing it and remounting it. No effect on the running system. Other reasons: I usually keep spool directories (for print/mail servers) on dedicated partitions, that way if someone tries to DoS the server by filling up a spool directory, it doesn't bring the whole system down. Keeping / seperate from any other busy filesystem is a good idea, so filesystems that are doing a lot of read/write won't increase the potential of a corrupt / filesystem, thus you always have a booting system. >Any responses would be appreciated. I feel like I'm in limbo with this >stupid machine because I can't decide on the partitioning... If you really don't know where you need the space ... there are two solutions that will work well 90% of the time: 100 M / 2XRAM for swap 1G /var 4G /usr leave the rest unpartitioned and you can add it later if you need it. The other way is to use the same layout, but after laying out /, swap and /var, use whatever's left for /usr. Personally, I prefer to keep things like filesharing on a seperate filesystem and I almost always label it /data. There's no reason you MUST use the /, /var, /usr layout. If I had a lot of users logging in, I'd make /home a seperate partition. Mostly depends on what the machine will be doing. -Bill To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message