From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Mar 6 1: 8:26 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mired.org (dsl-64-192-6-133.telocity.com [64.192.6.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 1028737B404 for ; Wed, 6 Mar 2002 01:08:23 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 70095 invoked by uid 100); 6 Mar 2002 09:08:22 -0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15493.56451.886414.268929@guru.mired.org> Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2002 03:08:19 -0600 To: Brian T.Schellenberger Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: filesystems In-Reply-To: <46294783@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ From: "Mike Meyer" X-Delivery-Agent: TMDA/0.48 (Python 2.2 on freebsd4) 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 Brian T.Schellenberger types: > On Monday 04 March 2002 11:57 pm, Patrick Fish wrote: > > My disk layout looks like this: > > > > Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on > > /dev/ad0s1a 18G 2.7G 14G 16% / > > procfs 4.0K 4.0K 0B 100% /proc > > ........ > > Would it be a good idea to break the major dirs into seperate partitions? > > I prefer it that way, but it's simpler in many ways to just have one--you > never wind up shuffling bits of your system around when the ratio between > partition sizes turns out to be wrong. > > The big drawback is that if your f/s ever gets trashed, *everything* is gone, > including the partition that you might have wanted to stick around to > facilitate recovery. That's true, but 1) FreeBSD file systems are *much* more robust than they were in 1990. 2) Disk drives - even el cheapo IDE drivers are *much* more reliable than they were in 1990. 3) The total lossage from having a system down is much less with a single-user workstation than it was with the typical 1990 era VAX, which was what most FreeBSD users were on. 4) You should create a recovery disk, or by the CD set that includes one. > Another drawback is that if a process goes insane and consume infinite /tmp > space it gets to eat the entire HD before it stops. For these reasons I > partition /var, /tmp, and /home to their own space, as well as a /ext > parition for "big junk" that I want to back up and /more for "big junk" that > I don't. My solution for /tmp is to allocate a bit of extra swap space, and use an mfs partition for it. That solves the problem of things writing big temp files and hosing your system, and insures you of a clean /tmp after every boot as well. > > If so, could i do this with fdisk WITHOUT reformatting? - > No. Which is why I'd just leave well enough alone & keep good backups until > I had some other reason to re-install, unless your system is brand-new and > you haven't customized much of anything. There's a good way to deal with that. That's one of those white paper's I've never finding time to write. Keep customizations in a source control system. That way, when you reinstall, you can put the old customizations back with a single command. Then you can find the things you weren't didn't track properly and fix them :-). http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message