From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Oct 8 1:17:12 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mip.co.za (puck.mip.co.za [209.212.106.44]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5040E37B403 for ; Mon, 8 Oct 2001 01:17:01 -0700 (PDT) Received: from patrick (patrick.mip.co.za [10.3.13.181]) by mip.co.za (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id KAA47750; Mon, 8 Oct 2001 10:16:44 +0200 (SAST) (envelope-from patrick@mip.co.za) From: "Patrick O'Reilly" To: "Scott Gerhardt" Cc: Subject: RE: New Install Questions Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 10:19:54 +0200 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2911.0) X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400 In-Reply-To: <15294.35635.124287.741206@guru.mired.org> Importance: Normal 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 Scott > 2.) This is highly subjective, but what are some generally accepted > partitioning schemes for a general purpose Web and Mail server? I'm > mostly concerned with the sizing of /var and I would like to keep > the variable data on it's own partition. I have 18GB to slice to > start, and the bulk of the data will be databases, html-docs, mail > and logs. > > It's hard to state sizing information without knowing how big you > expect the logs to be. In general, FreeBSD file systems are enough > more robust than Linux file systems that you don't really need lots of > partitions. If there isn't any user data on the server, I just use a / > and /var, then put the web tree on /var as well. That way, you can > mount / read-only. If you have users logging in and mucking with data, > make it /, /home and /var. I'm not going to argue with Mike who has far more experience than I do, but here is an alternative which was discussed just last week on the list: > Greg Lehey's fine book suggests symlink-ing /var, as suggested > also by Zach. > > The last 10 or 15 boxes I have set up have no /var partition, > just / (128M), swap (xxxM), and /usr (the rest of the first > disk). Immediately after installation I do this: > > # mkdir /usr/var > # cd /var > # tar cf - . | (cd /usr/var; tar xf -) > # ls -al /usr/var # Just to be sure it happened! > # cd / > # rm -rf /var > # ln -s /usr/var /var > > I do the same with /tmp, then: > # shutdown -r now > so that the box can come up clean with the new /var . > > This procedure has NEVER given me trouble, and it saves worrying > about a small /var partition. > > Thanks to Greg's instructions :) I guess the two options are much of a muchness! I *feel* more comfortable with Greg's option because there is so much more installed on /usr. And the / partition can be very small. I use 128M for /, but have never seen the actual utilization exceed 60M when using this scheme. I prefer the idea of having fewer files linked via a symlink. But, as I said, Mike and Greg are both far more experienced than me - so either scheme is probably equally good. Patrick. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message