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Date:      Wed, 14 Sep 2005 18:39:40 +0100 (BST)
From:      Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Marcel Moolenaar <marcel@xcllnt.net>
Cc:        Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@FreeBSD.org>, src-committers@FreeBSD.org, Brooks Davis <brooks@one-eyed-alien.net>, cvs-src@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org, Garance A Drosehn <gad@FreeBSD.org>
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/sys/conf kern.post.mk
Message-ID:  <20050914183720.P57836@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <0D07312F-7DDB-40E4-A63A-3E00969F5A4C@xcllnt.net>
References:  <20050911002229.51F4916A471@hub.freebsd.org> <432382BC.5080105@root.org> <200509110310.36423@harrymail> <43255152.3000609@freebsd.org> <20050912165518.GA94181@dragon.NUXI.org> <20050913125820.GA10663@FreeBSD.org> <F74CCD5E-AD4C-4343-9626-5F6460C4D6C6@xcllnt.net> <p06230916bf4d11bb5363@[128.113.24.47]> <20050914100957.L33820@fledge.watson.org> <20050914155307.GA32734@odin.ac.hmc.edu> <0D07312F-7DDB-40E4-A63A-3E00969F5A4C@xcllnt.net>

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On Wed, 14 Sep 2005, Marcel Moolenaar wrote:

>>> We probably ought to move this discussion to another list, but -- I 
>>> remember two very specific occasions where I first realized how 
>>> important an isolated /var is:
>>> 
>>> (1) In about 1995, when I first started using ppp, I discovered the
>>>     hard way that the default logging level was set a bit high, and filled
>>>     the entire hard disk with log records in a couple of days.
> *snip*
>> 
>> I've also hit cases where the log come in so fast that you can fill a
>> 1GB /var fast enough that newsyslog never has a chance to compress the
>> log.
> *snip*
>
> Just so that people realize: what is being described is not an argument 
> for having /var be a separate partition, but really for having /var/log 
> be a separate partition. It's just that the granularity of our thinking 
> is highly influenced by our legacy, even to the extend of it becoming an 
> intellectual jail.
>
> I think it's much easier to size a /var/log partition effectively than 
> it is to size /, /usr and /var effectively...
>
> Just some food for thought,

Yeah, I specifically mentioned /var/mqueue and /var/mail as examples of 
other components.

I agree though that what current and past state of the art has supported 
is narrowing our thinking.  If we were using a system like AFS (listen to 
the groans from the crowd who hates it when I harp on AFS!), we would 
simply allocate different volumes for the directories using the same 
back-end storage pool, and be able to administratively change the volume 
quotas at low overhead.  The traditional BSD/UNIX quota model and/or file 
system model has no way to express this sort of notion, and it's a very 
useful notion.

Robert N M Watson



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