Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 22:19:25 -0600 From: David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Partitioning suggestions? Message-ID: <199711180419.WAA05810@nospam.hiwaay.net> In-Reply-To: Message from chuckr@glue.umd.edu of "Mon, 17 Nov 1997 21:11:18 EST." <199711180211.VAA18014@earth.mat.net>
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> A friend who programs a lot shocked me by saying that she regularly
> installs just one big partition, for /,/usr/ the whole works. I'd
> never done that myself, but I've been trying to come up with some solid
> reason why it's a bad idea.
We regularly do that at work with Irix and Solaris. When users totally
fill the fs we simply shrug and say, "Yeah, so the whole system comes
to a halt? What do you expect? Don't fill the disks to 100%". Actually
the systems don't come to a complete halt and I usually learn of the
full filesystem only when I read the syslog. Needless to say this isn't
an ISP or typical server application. But one where somebody is likely
to make a stink because they see 100M somewhere they can't write.
Actually 4G root filesystems have worked pretty well for us.
By splitting the disk into filesystems you establish limits where one
kind of data is protected from other kinds of data. And you do it a bit
more simply than the quota solution. A small root partition with the
critical tools was once very useful for rescuing the rest of the system
in the event of a nasty crash. Found out a couple of weeks ago that
Solaris 2.5.1 with the C2 auditing module *won't boot single user*.
Only way in is by booting off the CDROM.
Also the more filesystems you have the less data you lose if you trash
an entire filesystem. Since I converted my personal stuff from Linux to
FreeBSD a couple of years ago I haven't had to deal with that problem.
Hmmm. Still thinking about what to do with my new 9G disk:
nospam: {145} df -k
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/sd0a 31775 19481 9752 67% /
/dev/sd0s2f 1875679 1174571 551054 68% /usr
/dev/sd0s2e 31775 2474 26759 8% /var
procfs 4 4 0 100% /proc
/dev/sd1s2a 38991 6 35866 0% /r
/dev/sd1s2f 1017327 662103 273838 71% /r/usr
/dev/sd1s2g 2427552 1 2233347 0% /r/usr1
/dev/sd1s2h 2427552 1 2233347 0% /r/usr2
/dev/sd1s2d 2427552 1 2233347 0% /r/usr3
/dev/sd1s2e 127151 1 116978 0% /r/var
Think I'll make my new / (see /r above) about 64M. Think I like the
above partitioning otherwise. No partition is much larger than I can
get on a 4mm DAT without compression.
--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net
=====================================================================
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.
--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net
=====================================================================
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.
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