Date: Wed, 10 Sep 1997 19:27:01 +1000 From: Stephen McKay <syssgm@dtir.qld.gov.au> To: "Marty Leisner" <leisner@sdsp.mc.xerox.com> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, syssgm@dtir.qld.gov.au Subject: Re: How should I partition my disk? Message-ID: <199709100927.TAA24315@ogre.dtir.qld.gov.au> In-Reply-To: <9709091907.AA22307@gnu.sdsp.mc.xerox.com> from "Marty Leisner" at "Tue, 09 Sep 1997 19:07:07 %2B0000" References: <9709091907.AA22307@gnu.sdsp.mc.xerox.com>
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On Tuesday, 9th September 1997, "Marty Leisner" wrote: >I've seen no guidelines on how big to make partitions...(if I've >missed it, please point it out to me). >I have a 6.4 gig IDE quantum bigfoot...I'm willing to give >about 1.2 gig to freebsd... >Any reasonable ideas for a basic install (i.e. sizes and mount points)? >(I hate the fact we insiston swap space). It's sort of a suck-it-and-see situation. An ISP is going to have different ideas about partitioning than a home user. A power X11 user's machine will have different requirements to a dedicated name server. The answer even changes over time because the underlying reasons change over time. For example, a small root partition was once essential for system recovery purposes. Now you could dispense with that (merging / and /usr) and rely on the fixit floppy. But I can give you some hints. :-) Make a separate partition for root and usr and one for every system you want to "box in" (that is, keep from crowding other stuff). So, if I was making a news server, I'd make root, swap, usr, newsctl, newspool and possibly one for news overviews. If I was hosting user mailboxes, /var/mail would get its own partition. On production boxes around here, various database intensive applications get their own partitions to stop them stomping on other applications, and to make backup orderly and neat. It's not a cut and dried science, and the bigger the box, the more you plan ahead. "So, what's this got to do with me?" you say. In your case, you probably just want to tinker at home. So, you can get by with just root, swap and usr. I'd recommend 30 to 50 Mb for root, 60 or more Mb for swap (I never use less than 2xRAM), and the rest for usr. There is a school of thought that says you should separate system directories from user directories (because it makes backups neater and system rebuilds simpler). If you want to follow this, you could try giving half of your spare space to /usr and half to /home. At home, I run with root, swap, usr, home and cvs. I only split the last bit into home and cvs to make them fit my backup device. You will be backing your stuff up, right? ;-) If you accidentally constrict yourself you can work around most problems using symbolic links, like if /var fills up /, you can move it to /usr/var and symlink /var to /usr/var. If you run out of swap, set "swapfile" in /etc/rc.conf to add some swap using vnconfig. In time, you will get the hang of it. Then you can get a Unix sysadm job! Stephen.
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