How should I divvy up my HDDs? Suggestions Please.

[RW]

On Thursday 05 May 2005 14:25, freebsd.org at donnacha.com wrote:
> 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?

Possibly, he sees it as the kind of thing that should go in /var due to 
frequent changes. /var holds things that generate heavy file fragmentation, 
such as spool files, logs etc. 
 

> 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?

The precise size depends on your needs, people use values from a few hundred 
MB to a few GB, however generally applictions that need a lot of temporary 
storage will let you specify where it goes.

/ is probably the worst partition  to put /tmp in. In FreeBSD the root 
partition is small and contains the critical files needed to get the system 
up into single user mode, so you can perform repairs. You want to reduce to 
risk of damaging it, and it's used without soft-updates or background 
checking, so it's not very efficient for writing anyway.

/usr doesn't need to be all that big, a lot of people symlink out /usr/ports 
and /usr/src and have just 4GB - even on a desktop.