I need further HDD advice before submitting order.

Chuck Swiger cswiger at mac.com
Wed May 11 10:02:50 PDT 2005


freebsd.org at donnacha.com wrote:
[ ... ]
> I understand a little more than I did but am still unsure as to how I 
> should divide the HDDs and would very much appreciate reactions to my 
> current proposal.

Howdy--

If it helps, please note that FreeBSD will fit just fine into 10GB or less. 
How you want to layout 280 GB should be driven by how you want to arrange your 
content.  For what it's worth, I'd rather have two 80GB drives in a RAID-1 
mirror than have my stuff on two seperate drives, but using software RAID like 
vinum/gvinum, you can still mirror 80GB onto the 200GB drive, and have an 
additional 120 GB of space left over.

[ You don't have to do anything about that now, if you do leave an 80 GB chunk 
of space uncommitted on the big disk. ]

> ----------
> 
> Server purpose: Initially just forums, later sundry other Web apps i.e. 
> ecommerce, ticket bookings etc.  Will possibly become a heavy-duty email 
> server at some stage.
> 
> 2GB RAM
> 
> 80GB HDD IDE:
> / = 1GB
> /usr = 15GB
> /local = 15GB
> Swap = 4GB
> Unallocated = 40GB
> 
> 200GB HDD IDE:
> 
> /tmp = 2GB (is that enough?)
> /home = 28GB
> /var = 100GB (will inclube the forum databases etc)
> Unallocated = 70GB
> 
> I'll be asking them to put the both disks in dangerously dedicated mode, 
> with each on a different IDE bus.

Don't use "dangerously dedicated mode" for your boot drive.  Reserving the 63 
sectors at the beginning for a MBR-style layout is a trivial waste of space 
compared with the hassle of not being able to boot from the drive

> Is it a good idea leaving so much unallocated space?  My research 
> suggests that this may be useful for moving directories around or giving 
> specific subdirectories their own partition at a later date when I have 
> a better idea of usage, does that sound right?

Yes, it's a good idea.  There is nothing wrong with configuring all of the 
space to be used if you want to do so and you know what the usage and growth 
are going to be.  However, if you are not certain about how various 
filesystems grow, there is a real advantage to having some unallocated space 
handy.

> The only problem about creating partitions at a later date is that I 
> will have command line access only, I'm not even sure if I can create 
> partitions at a later date, I think that for sysinstall I might actually 
> have to be there.  Can anyone advise me on this?

You can run /stand/sysinstall remotely via the command line, if you like.

Either way, you can adjust the partition table and create new filesystems 
later on without a problem.

> Swap: As the second disk will have the presumably quite busy /tmp and 
> /var, placing all the swap on this the first disk, rather than shared 
> between both, could help to balance the load a bit (thanks to Henry 
> Miller for that suggestion).  With 2GB of RAM, I'm hoping the Swap won't 
> be needed very often anyway; if it is, I may simply add more memory.

You want to have your swap partition be a little larger than the amount of RAM 
you have; use 2.5 or 3 GB for swap.

The biggest problem I see with your layout about is that you don't have a 
complete bootable system on just the 80 GB drive.  If you start moving disks 
around between machines, for some reason (whether it's to add another box to 
split the workload, or because one of the drives is showing failure signs and 
needs to be replaced), you may really regret doing so.

I'd be happier with:

80GB HD:
/	1 GB
swap	3 GB
/tmp	6 GB
/var	20 GB
/usr    20 GB
/home?	30 GB maybe, or might leave unused

Do this as two FDISK partitions, the first with a bootable system via BSd 
partition slices, the second as /home or unused.

200GB HD:
unused	80 GB reserved at beginning of disk, either for possible mirror or as 
needed for another filesystem based on growth
swap	3 GB (optional, could be put in the 80 GB slice above)
/local	40 GB I'd call this /opt, myself :-)
/home?	40 GB maybe I'd put /home here, and not on the 80 GB
unused	40 GB for a while until you see which filesystems grow and/or to 
balance disk utilization...

Do this as 4 FDISK partitions.

The thing is, 20 GB will still fit a ton of stuff in /var.  When it starts 
getting full, take your biggest database or the forums or whatever, and move 
it to it's own partition using the 30 or 40 GB of space left uncommitted, and 
use a symlink so the old path still works...

-- 
-Chuck




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