From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Jan 24 14:23:27 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (dsl-64-192-6-133.telocity.com [64.192.6.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 1F18C37B402 for ; Thu, 24 Jan 2002 14:23:17 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 38010 invoked by uid 100); 24 Jan 2002 22:23:16 -0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15440.35155.637495.417404@guru.mired.org> Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 16:23:15 -0600 To: Brad Knowles Cc: chip , freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Bad disk partitioning policies (was: "Re: FreeBSD Intaller (was "Re: ... RedHat ...")") In-Reply-To: References: <20020123114658.A514@lpt.ens.fr> <20020123124025.A60889@HAL9000.wox.org> <3C4F5BEE.294FDCF5@mindspring.com> <20020123223104.SM01952@there> 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/0.44 (Python 2.2; freebsd-4.4-STABLE-i386) Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Brad Knowles types: > At 10:31 PM -0800 2002/01/23, chip wrote: > > thing I did was give / 100 megs, then give /swap double whatever the ram is, > > and the rest goes to /usr. > The issue of what is intelligent partitioning has been > discussed previously on this list. However, I believe that dumping > everything in /usr is a really bad idea. Among other things, you > have no way of keeping a runaway program from eating up all available > disk space and causing a serious DoS on the system. With a separate > /var partition, a runaway program is likely to only be able to fill > that up, leaving the rest of the system okay. You'd need to symlink > /usr/tmp to /var/tmp, however. So instead of causing a serious DoS by running /usr out of space, you cause a serious DoS by running /var out of space. That will shut down all the daemons that log to /var/log; anything trying to update things in /var/db, which is most of the databases; mail and the printers will quit working; and so on. Unless you've got user home directories on /usr, it's relatively static. Leaving /var on it just means you get that much more space to run out of before things break. The same thing applies to /. So the end result of leaving /, /usr and /var on one file system - so long as users home directories aren't on it - is that /var has lots of free space. In practice, I typically split out /usr and back it up much less frequently than / + /var, as / and /var have critical information on them. If it's a sever without users, I put all the server data on /var, with the binaries on /, and mount / read-only. 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-chat" in the body of the message