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Date:      Fri, 2 Jul 2010 10:22:35 +0100
From:      krad <kraduk@googlemail.com>
To:        Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk>
Cc:        Ed Flecko <edflecko@gmail.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: /boot is full after running "make installkernel" on FreeBSD 8.0
Message-ID:  <AANLkTikzPBPENr3OhAro3s9nnlBL2poQ7Wi7kJ040hZ4@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <4C2D9659.3060208@infracaninophile.co.uk>
References:  <AANLkTil7rb8_YNbGPfwsNt1_Zn4hdOr9hTpGwVwTEbrF@mail.gmail.com> <20100701212112.GA28138@gizmo.acns.msu.edu> <AANLkTinLgvd9GLP8RXeiWcowBoFxSeZSJLMHjCFq8jGR@mail.gmail.com> <4C2D9659.3060208@infracaninophile.co.uk>

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On 2 July 2010 08:33, Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk>wrote:

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> On 01/07/2010 22:29:54, Ed Flecko wrote:
> > Henrik,
> > When I FIRST installed 8.0, I did create a separate /home partition.
> > When I installed the kernel and starting running out of space in / , I
> > thought "O.K...I'll let FreeBSD make the partition sizes IT wants to
> > and see if I have the same problem, and I did.
> >
> > Apparently, 512M is just, not, quite big enough so I think I'll try 1G
> > to give me plenty of room.
>
> Is it time for me to start advocating "one big partition" again?
>
> This may not be the consensus view, but I have found that for a quiet
> life and general lack of botheration it helps to create *only two*
> partitions on your hard drive:
>
>     b: Swap -- usually 2x RAM
>     a: Everything else
>
> Now, I've run this setup on literally hundreds of servers without
> problems.  The usual argument against doing this is "but a run-away
> process might log so much that is fills your hard drive."  This is true.
>  You might also be killed by a lightning strike the next time you leave
> your house.  Run-away logfiles are actually pretty rare, and given that
> 80GB would be considered a pretty small hard drive nowadays, and you can
> fit a standard FreeBSD install with quite a lot of extra software inside
> 10GB, you're likely to have sufficient empty space that you'ld get days
> of warning before it caused real trouble.  In which case, newsyslog(8)
> is your friend.  Cycling logs based on size and checking that every hour
> will avoid almost all trouble.  You do monitor disk space usage on your
> servers don't you?  Cacti is in ports and its pretty easy to set up, as
> are several other alternatives.
>
> Watch this list: you'll see people having trouble with too small root
> partitions with great regularity.  I don't think I've /ever/ seen anyone
> ask about dealing with a process generating huge amounts of log data.
>
> Even if you do fill up the hard drive, it's not actually guaranteed
> disaster.  FreeBSD itself will keep running just fine.  So will most web
> applications -- although you won't get any logging.  Simply delete some
> of the excess files, and the system will spring back to normal function.
>  Filling the partition certainly will crash a database, but for serious
> RDBMS setups, I generally make an exception and put the database working
> files onto their own partition[*].
>
> Nowadays too, I much prefer using ZFS -- so I have *one* zpool from
> which is allocated all of the space for the zdevs on the system.  This
> is much the best of both worlds -- you get as many filesystems as you
> can eat, but each of them can use as much of the total available space
> as it needs to.
>
>        Cheers,
>
>        Matthew
>
> [*] As this usually involves hardware RAID10 with plenty of cache and a
> BBU on at least 4 x 15k RPM SAS2 drives, it would generally be on a
> separate partition in any case.
>
> - --
> Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                   7 Priory Courtyard
>                                                  Flat 3
> PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey     Ramsgate
> JID: matthew@infracaninophile.co.uk               Kent, CT11 9PW
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all i can say is your a brave boy 8) A 1 TB+ / slice would take ages to
fsck.

Of course all these issues go away with zfs



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