Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 04:42:10 -0400 (EDT) From: CyberPeasant <djv@bedford.net> To: dave@gregory.dyn.ml.org (Dave) Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: adding drive & filesystem facelift Message-ID: <199806170842.EAA23977@lucy.bedford.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.980616222209.13762A-100000@gregory.dyn.ml.org> from Dave at "Jun 16, 98 10:50:18 pm"
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Dave wrote
>
> As I am finding myself running out of /var and swap space, I would like to
> redo my current setup. I have a 3 Gigger and 850 meg:
>
> #df -k
> Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
> /dev/wd0s1a 31775 16754 12479 57% /
> /dev/wd0s1f 2864414 967950 1667311 37% /usr
> /dev/wd0s1e 29727 12828 14521 47% /var
> procfs 4 4 0 100% /proc
> /dev/wd2c 805199 155051 585733 21% /usr/src
>
...
> I believe that somebody confirmed that FreeBSD will use more than one swap
> partititions - are there any special concerns here or do I just create a
> swap partition, add an fstab entry and be done with it?
I believe that to be the case. But if the disks are of radically
different speed, then swap and /tmp should preferentially go on the
faster disk. (Especially in the case of IDE drives, which are not as
optimizable as SCSI.) /usr/src and /usr are good choices for the pig.
> Secondly, what the heck to I do about the old /var currently mounted on
> /dev/wd0s1e? I really want to avoid repartioning that drive.
Well, that depends. It's only 1% of the drive. you could just forget
it. It looks like it borders on the high end of swap. Maybe you
could use more swap on that drive. (Boot single user, and use
disklabel -e to enlarge the swap parition. Carefully :) You could
remount it on /root, maybe. /tmp is another likely candidate. Yeah.
Mount it on /tmp is my vote. maybe / could be mounted read-only in
this case.
Here's a question for someone else: if you duped / onto it, could you
make it boot (as an emergency measure) from that partition? This can be
/quite/ handy for standalone use, or if wd0s1a gets corrupted. Make a
small self-contained BSD in it.
> Thirdly, and this idea was brought on by an earlier thread, am I better
> off with a real /home rather than /usr/home? This seems advantageous to me
> (and I'm really not trying to start a debate).
The advantage of one big partition is more flexible storage use. Your
free space is always in one place, not 10 megs here, 20 megs there.
(Less problems like that orphaned /var). The disadvantage is that
"one shot kills 'em all". Depending on how you backup, large partitions
can be annoying. I'm a partisan of small partitions; the goal being
to localize things, and to enable as much of the system as possible
to be mounted read-only.
> Lastly, am I overlooking a better solution? I'm thinking that maybe I can
> implement some sort of optimization strategy in which I spread the
> filesystems over the two disks to increase speed by utilizing my disks
> more efficiently. Clearly this would have been much easier if I had
a little easier
> both disks installed when I installed FreeBSD, but if someone has a
> suggestion, please point me in the right direction.
Unfortunately, the big wins in optimization strategy come with
SCSI disks. If you can, try putting the second IDE drive on a second
controller channel, if your card|board has one. Ah, I see you already
did that.
Dave
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