How should I divvy up my HDDs? Suggestions Please.

freebsd.org at donnacha.com freebsd.org at donnacha.com
Thu May 5 06:25:44 PDT 2005


Jerry, thanks for your advice!

 > If all your accounts and web pages
 > are really in /home and you have no databases, I would be inclined
 > to put both /usr and /var in the 80GB drive and leave the other one
 > for home directories and web pages.

In The Complete FreeBSD, Greg Lehey suggests that it's a good idea to 
place web pages in /var, I don't quite grasp why.  Do you think it would 
be a better idea to stick with the standard and leave web pages in /home?

As for databases, I'll have a lot of MySQL DBs and possibly, at a later 
date, Postgresql. I'm hoping to specialize in forum-based web-sites and 
Web apps generally.  As I understand it, forum content is actually 
stored in the DB and pulled dynamically via PHP, meaning, I think, that 
the DB of each forum will take up a lot more space that the templated 
PHP pages that make up the "site" part of the equation.  I could be 
wrong about that.

What about /tmp?  Looking through this list's archives, I read that it's 
considered more secure to place /tmp on a seperate partition from /, 
would it be even more secure to place it on a seperate HDD?  How big 
should /tmp be?

Here's a pretty stupid question I have, apologies for my lack of clue: 
do I have to define the size of each partition?  Is it difficult to 
change them at a later date?  I'll only have command-line access.

Thanks again,

Donnacha


Jerry McAllister wrote:
>>Hello, I'm new to FreeBSD and this list, my name is Donnacha, I'm an 
>>Irishman living in Edinburgh, Scotland.
>>
>>I have read The Complete FreeBSD's section on disk partioning but would 
>>very much appreciate some advice on how to divide up the 2 HDDs I'm 
>>getting on my new server.
>>
>>The server is located in a facility in the US and will be used as a Web 
>>and email server.  It has an 80GB HDD and a 200GB HDD, both IDE but I'm 
>>asking for them to be placed on seperate buses.
>>
>>I was thinking of using the 80GB as the primary and placing / on it, 
>>while putting /var, /usr and /home on the 200GB.
>>
>>I'll have 2GB of RAM, so, I was thinking about putting 2GB of swap on 
>>each HDD.
>>
>>How does that sound.  I would be very grateful for any advice you can 
>>give me before I relay my instructions to the guys doing the installation.
> 
> 
> It depends a lot on what you leave in /usr and /var and /home.
> It kind of looks like you will leave the 80GB drive mostly empty
> the way you are doing things.  If all your accounts and web pages 
> are really in /home and you have no databases, I would be inclined 
> to put both /usr and /var in the 80GB drive and leave the other one 
> for home directories and web pages.   Since the default place for 
> databases is in /var that can make a big difference on where you put 
> it or if you take the db directory out of /var and put it somewhere 
> else, etc.
> 
> Putting some of your swap on each drive as you have indicated
> is a good idea.
> 
> ////jerry
> 
> 
>>Thanks and I look forward to participating in this community,
>>
>>Donnacha
>>
>>
>>
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> 
> 




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