From owner-freebsd-chat Fri Jan 25 15:26:40 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 3FC5137B429 for ; Fri, 25 Jan 2002 15:26:29 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 49464 invoked by uid 100); 25 Jan 2002 23:26:27 -0000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15441.59810.814354.950502@guru.mired.org> Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 17:26:26 -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> <15440.35155.637495.417404@guru.mired.org> <15440.53202.747536.126815@guru.mired.org> <15441.17382.77737.291074@guru.mired.org> 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 5:39 AM -0600 2002/01/25, Mike Meyer wrote: > Indeed, my methods may not help you much with the system you > have. It all depends on what is happening on the machine and how the > various filesystems are being used. For machines that log a whole > lot of data (mail systems with logging turned up to high levels for > accounting or accountability reasons, web servers, etc...), I believe > that things like this may be more important. I agree about that - if you're going to be logging lots of data, you probably want to segregate that from everything else. For a mail server - as opposed to a mail gateway - you probably want the mail queue segregated. That's the real point - you need to think about what the system will be used for. Blindly partitioning the disk into umpteen file systems is no better than blindly putting everything in one big file system. The world has changed so much since the original BSD layouts were designed that they are pretty much irrelevant. So I start with everything on one file system, then figure out what needs to be split from it, and why. > I usually install log file management tools that centralize > all the log data from various machines onto a separate server, and > very little (if any) log data is ever kept locally. > I used to use syslog for this, until we discovered that we > were losing something like 75% of all data being sent to syslog Did you look into any of the alternative solutions? In particular, Dan Berenstein - the author of qmail - has one designed to solve that problem. I haven't checked on it, but that 75% figure make me think I ought to. > > In my experience, that's true of workstations, but not servers. Then > > again, I make sure that data files that need to change on servers are > > configured to be outside of /usr/local, just to avoid that problem. > The basic stuff in /usr doesn't change too much, but if > you're keeping up with updates to packages that are under constant > development, or if you're keeping up with the latest security holes & > patches, I simply don't see any alternative -- if it's not in > /usr/local, then it's someplace else and poses an equal problem/risk. I would expect that the same logic would apply to what's on /usr. Of course, if you're not trying to keep up with updates to it, and only tracking security fixes, it stays stable. Again, the same is true of the stuff I put in /usr/local. I tend to leave it alone unless the client specifically asks for an update, or I'm fixing a security hole. 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