Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 16:19:25 -0600 From: "Jeffrey J. Mountin" <mountin.man@mixcom.com> To: andrew@pubnix.net, lamaster@george.arc.nasa.gov Cc: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Sendmail - low on space Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.19980127161925.0070865c@198.137.186.100> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980127162021.21902F-100000@guardian.fortress .org> References: <199801272034.MAA04209@george.arc.nasa.gov>
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At 04:24 PM 1/27/98 -0500, Andrew Webster wrote: >I'll jump in on this one as I've been bitten by the small /var more than >once! > >Watch out for /tmp too as the the local mail delivery agent called by >sendmail (usually rmail) will write into /tmp. So if you are trying >to deliver a large file it may still fail, and even if you have the space >in /var/mail. I've been bitten by /tmp myself. Majordomo can kill a small /tmp in a hurry. >I create my systems without a physical /var parition and symlink /var and >/tmp into /usr/var and /usr/tmp respectively, this eliminates all >problems, and you don't end up "wasting" lots of disk space for temporary >files. > >Can we make this the default of sysinstall? > >Alternatively you CAN create a biggish /var partion and link /tmp into >/var/tmp. There may be reasons against this, since some programs use /var/tmp and /usr/tmp for different things, but see no practical reason why not. >On Tue, 27 Jan 1998 lamaster@george.arc.nasa.gov wrote: --snip-- >> I know it is unfashionable right now to say this, and, >> each to his own taste, but, /var was created for a reason. >> The reason hasn't really gone away. I think it in >> multiple-user environments it is good planning >> to decide how much to reserve in advance for, e.g., >> the user mail input queues. As well as user home >> directories and other similar requirements. Preference and needs of the situation should dictate how you manage the filesystems. As the number of users grow, more disks are needed... >> In other words, while the original user needs help and probably >> doesn't feel like re-partitioning the disk at this point, >> in general, I recommend planning the /var partition in advance >> and partitioning the disk accordingly. The FreeBSD sysinstall >> defaults are reasonable for smallish disks, but most people >> have more memory and bigger disks today, and would benefit from >> generally larger partitions (including swap). But, the basic >> partitioning is very reasonable; the default sizes for /, swap, >> and /var, should probably be larger for larger disks. I forget the defaults, but do recall that as packages were added to a system, the wasted space having separate /var and /usr partitions was an issue and forced me to start over fresh. :/ For a single user consigning /var to /usr/var and /tmp to either (/usr)/var/tmp or /usr/tmp works fine and if more space is needed, then another disk(s) can be used for the mount point(s) you wish. Even for a personal system, I'd much rather have 2 or 3 small disks. In an ISP environment only a DNS server could have one drive, IMHO. Unless you want to go overkill from the start, adjusting partition sizes on a production server is a greater hassle, easier to add a disk to either a growing or heavily hit filesystem. As the system grows it would be advisable to separate /var/spool/* (or just mqueue) and /var/mail, so the working and storage directories are on different disks, even to the point of using mutiple disks to break apart /var/mail. It all depends on if disk IO can keep up with demand. Break off /usr/home if there are a lot of shell users. I consider / and /usr the "base" of the system and work from there on what the needs will be by adding more drives. Jeff Mountin - Unix Systems TCP/IP networking mountin.man@mixcom.com
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