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Date:      Tue, 20 Feb 2007 20:50:03 +0100
From:      Roger Olofsson <raggen@passagen.se>
To:        Joe Vender <jvender@owensboro.net>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Best partitioning scheme for my HDD? Please advise.
Message-ID:  <45DB50EB.6010901@passagen.se>
In-Reply-To: <200702192337.13712.jvender@owensboro.net>
References:  <200702192337.13712.jvender@owensboro.net>

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Hello Joe,

May I suggest a small trick that really makes your life alot easier. Go 
with the default values when you install the FreeBSD, ie accept the 
sysinstall generated autos. (Make sure to make / and swap the first 
partitions though).

Now, whenever a partition gets filled up, just do a symlink to another 
partition. The command is ln -s and is a real lifesaver. Whenever all 
partitions are full, just stick another HD in the machine and ln -s to 
that drive.

Say f'rinstance that your /var/log gets filled up. Just symlink it to 
another partition with more space. (Of course when it comes to logs, you 
should always set these to rotate and newsyslog.conf is your friend.)

This works for everything, you can of course change stuff like the 
mysql-server.sh script to point database folders to different places 
than default but why bother when a simple symlink does the trick?

Now, the next trick I'd recommend is a bit more complicated to setup but 
it's basically the natural evolution of a symlink on a local machine. If 
you have another FreeBSD machine in your network, make one a NFS daemon 
and the other a NFS client and NFS-mount a drive from one machine to the 
other over the network. You could also use Samba to do this if your 
other machines aren't FreeBSD.

Good luck!

Greetings
/Roger

Joe Vender skrev:
> I have a 6120MB HDD which will be dedicated to FreeBSD 6.2. I intend to 
> install the ports collection and also KDE. I will operate from the KDE 
> environment using FreeBSD as a standalone desktop machine connected to the 
> net via a dialup internet connection. What would be the best sizes for the 
> disk partitions so that I don't run out of space on any of them while also 
> leaving the maximum amount of space possible for the future software to be 
> installed?
> My partitions will be:
> /
> swap
> /var
> /tmp
> /usr
> 
> as suggested using the auto option during slice creation.
> 
> I've found that if I use the default sizes that are chosen by the installer 
> using the auto option, the /usr partition fills up before everything is 
> installed and the installation fails. If I remember correctly, the auto 
> feature sets the sizes around the following sizes for my HDD:
> /				~500MB
> swap			~600MB
> /var				~1300MB
> /tmp			~ 500MB
> /usr				~3GB
> 
> 
> I've played around with the sizes, reducing /var to around 350Mb, / to around 
> 256Mb, and /tmp to around 256Mb leaving the space gained to /usr. In this 
> way, I got FreeBSD installed OK, but I'm considering installing it for a 
> final time and using it exclusively for my desktop after testing various 
> linuxes and FreeBSD and comparing them. So, I would like to get the sizes of 
> FreeBSD's slices optimized. I'm sure there are plenty of people in the user 
> community with a similar usage/size situation who can advise me.
> 
> Thanks,
> Joe
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