Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2006 15:32:26 -0400 From: Mike Meyer <mwm-keyword-freebsdhackers2.e313df@mired.org> To: bob@tamara-b.org Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: A New FreeBSD Server Message-ID: <17565.37706.966913.737964@bhuda.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <449D8616.5040306@tamara-b.org> References: <449D8616.5040306@tamara-b.org>
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In <449D8616.5040306@tamara-b.org>, Bob Richards <bob@tamara-b.org> typed: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Hi Folks: > > This is my first post here. I believe it is the correct list for my questions. If not, > please excuse me and direct me to the proper list. > > I have been using Linux as my WorkStation since V0.98 Kernel, so I know a bit about NIX's > I am giving up on Linux for various reasons which I won't go into here. > > I am setting up a Dell 2400 Server for FreeBSD use. I ordered the Big $79.00 CD/Manual set > for 6.1, and it should arrive in a few days. In the mean time I am setting up the server. > > The Dell, a dual CPU machine, has a PERC 2/Si controler, with 6 17GB drives. I am in the > process of verifying/formating the individual drives as I type. The next step will be to > create containers, which will appear as DRIVES to the new OS. > > My question is what is the best configuration for FreeBsd? I want some form of RAID, and > as fast a file system as is possible. I will be doing a very COMPLETE install, as I like > to do things like switch from KDE to Gnome once in a while, and have tons of office-type > apps. I need a full "C" development system, as well as a complete FreePascal setup. My CVS > Repository is around 10GB, and my Home dir currently has 10GB of additional stuff :-( One of the things I like about FreeBSD is that it installs the developer tools. One of the goals is (or was?) that a base install should be able to rebuild the system. So you get a complete C environment when you install the system. Likewise, packages don't come in "user" and "dev" variants - if you install something, you get the complete package, including all the things needed to compile code against the package. > Swap drive, should probably be a piece of one of the 17GB drives (NO RAID) the Box has > 500MB ram...... Why not RAID your swap? The extra reliability might not be worth very much, but the extra performance couldn't hurt - unless you don't plan on swapping at all. This is enough of a win that the swap subsystem will interleave swap usage across multiple drives, a facility that predates RAID. If you just split your swap across multiple drives, you get RAID0 behavior from swap. The other constraint on swap is that if you want the system to save a core dump if it panics, you need a device to dump on that's 64Kb bigger than ram. That's one device, not all of swap. FreeBSD has memory-backed file systems that use swap (I don't know if Linux has those or not), and it's generally a performance win to mount transient file systems on such. Doing this with /tmp and /var is common enough that there are rc.conf knobs to do this automatically at boot time. Those typically come from swap, with a variety of ways of allocating memory. See the "md" man page for details. So you can get that use out of swap, even if your processes don't swap much. You may be a little light on the ram. My desktop runs just fine in 512Mb, but I don't run GUI-heavy things like Gnome or KDE. I'd plan to add more RAM if I were you, because adding RAM is easy. Reconfiguring your disk system to add more swap so you can still get core dumps is noticably harder. So you might want to pretend you're allocating swap for a machine with a gig of ram, and put two 1gig+64K swap partitions on different spindles. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
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