From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Oct 8 7:58:20 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-31-203-60.mmcable.com [65.31.203.60]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 96E3937B409 for ; Mon, 8 Oct 2001 07:58:16 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 41942 invoked by uid 100); 8 Oct 2001 14:58:16 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15297.48904.41941.749008@guru.mired.org> Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 09:58:16 -0500 To: "Patrick O'Reilly" Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: New Install Questions In-Reply-To: <85190123@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\ 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 Patrick O'Reilly types: > > 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. [elided] > 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. Unless I've badly misunderstood what Greg is saying about partitioning these days, he no longer recommends a separate / and /usr. I've changed my mind in the last few years, after my experience with FreeBSD - vs. other Eunices - confirmed his contention that FreeBSD file systems are robust enough that the benefits outweigh the costs for this. There's no technological advantage to partitioning the disk on current releases of FreeBSD, that just creates more things that can run out of disk space. So rather than having / and /usr separate and symlinking /var to /usr/var, just make / and /usr one big partition that includes /var. The reasons to create separate partitions these days are *administrative*. Wantinging to mount part of the system r/o, or NFS export trees with different permissions, or have backup/restore/upgrade strategies, etc. The conclusion, as it was on the thread about swap space size, is that while there are some common "pat" answers or rules of thumb, you'll get better results if you make some estimates about how much space you'll need, think about how you want to use the space, and make decisions based on that information. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Q: How do you make the gods laugh? A: Tell them your plans. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message