Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2010 11:46:28 -1000 From: Clifton Royston <cliftonr@lava.net> To: Jeremy Chadwick <freebsd@jdc.parodius.com> Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 8.0-RELEASE -> -STABLE and size of / Message-ID: <20100123214628.GA10271@lava.net> In-Reply-To: <20100123202148.GA22096@icarus.home.lan> References: <20100122162155.GG3917@e-Gitt.NET> <a0fb7121676fe0c33302c1653d68e3ac@localhost> <20100122170716.GA75020@icarus.home.lan> <4B5B5669.9080906@quip.cz> <20100123202148.GA22096@icarus.home.lan>
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On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 12:21:48PM -0800, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 09:04:57PM +0100, Miroslav Lachman wrote:
> > Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
...
> > And why so big /tmp? I am running servers with smaller sizes for years
> > without any problem.
>
> My recommendation above doesn't imply those who don't use it will have
> problems -- each environment/system is different.
>
> That said, it's amazing how much software out there blindly uses /tmp.
> Last year I ran into this situation: an older server (1GB /tmp) started
> behaving oddly due to /tmp filling. A user of the system was using lynx
> to download some large files (an ISO image and something else, I forget
> what). lynx saves data its downloading to /tmp, and once it completes,
> the user is prompted where to save the data (CWD being the default).
Another example: the stock /usr/bin/sort uses /tmp for its temporary
storage when it needs to start using disk.
You can redirect that via -T if you think ahead and realize that it's
going to be a problem, but if you are just whipping up a quick shell
script and later happen to run it on much bigger inputs than you were
expecting you can run out of space on /. (Yes, that happened to me
fairly recently on several systems, when some log files weren't being
rotated on schedule.)
An alternative solution is to symlink /tmp to /var/tmp, which I've
done on many systems, assuming that nothing in the /etc/rc sequence
will need /tmp before filesystems are mounted. (I suppose putting it
on its own filesystem also assumes that.)
In general, I think you've got a good idea and I plan to start
adopting that in the future.
-- Clifton
--
Clifton Royston -- cliftonr@iandicomputing.com / cliftonr@lava.net
President - I and I Computing * http://www.iandicomputing.com/
Custom programming, network design, systems and network consulting services
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