Date: Tue, 04 Mar 1997 11:22:46 +0200 From: Nadav Eiron <nadav@barcode.co.il> To: Michael Alwan <alwan@rma.edu> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: disk usage reporting Message-ID: <331BE9E6.24C@barcode.co.il> References: <331BBB00.41C67EA6@rma.edu>
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Michael Alwan wrote: > > To all: > > Using df to look at my disk space, I get some confusing reports: > > free capacity mounted > on > /dev/wd0a -1282 104% / > /dev/wd0s4f etc etc This is a *very* weird setup. Why mounting something on /etc? Files in /etc are used before the filesystems get mounted (specificaly, /etc/fstab tells the system what filesystems to mount), so mounting something on top of that really makes no sense (at least to me). Are these the only file systems you have? > > The first entry perplexes me. According to the disk label editor, the > name of the disk is wd0, and the freebsd partition name is wd0s4, and > the file systems are wd0s4a...f. (This is a 1.6mb hard drive with three > primary dos partitions and one freebsd partition with the autodefaults > for file system allocation). Is the wd0a file system mentioned above > the root file system, and is it filling up because I log on as root and > all my mail and web caches are there? Why is it /dev/wd0a and not > /dev/wd0s4a? Perhaps these are the wages of the evil sin of logging on > as root--perhaps if I had a /usr/home directory I wouldn't be running > out of space. Any suggestions on how to handle this problem in the > future (relocate mail and disk caches--a temporary fix?), are my > suppositions correct, and what about the file system name > discrepancies. Any light shed on these matters would be appreciated! > > Thanks, > > Michael The root file system is reported without the slice number for historical reasons. Anyhow, FreeBSD will always boot the first BSD slice off the hard drive, so the slice number for the root filesystem is implicit. Using the root filesystem for all your needs is not recommended. Apart from getting it filled up you may also get it corrupted. The standard setup (with /usr and /var on separate file systems) will ensure that under normal operation the root filesystem is read-only, lowering the risk of corruption. Running as root also lets you use the space that UFS normaly reserves to allow faster allocations (that's why you have negative free space on it). This has a very large impact on write performance. In short - I usually try to use the root filesystem as little as possible. Most of my machines have just 20MB of root filesystem, and I never had it filled up. Your df output doesn't show any additional filesystems, but is /usr on a separate partition? If not, moving to /usr/home won't help... Nadav
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