An installation on SCSI Drives

[Toomas Aas]

Ronald Maggio wrote:

> Other then /root, /swap, /user, and /var, what other partitions are needed for a first go at FreeBSD, in Linux /home is often used, but what is a good lineup for FreeBSD other then the ones named so far?

First, let's get our terms correct.

A typical FreeBSD installation on one HDD uses two partitions: a FreeBSD 
partition and a swap partition. Inside the FreeBSD partition are slices, 
which are mounted under directories (mountpoints) such as /var.
So, your question seems to be about slices, not partitions.

The default FreeBSD installation doesn't have slices such as /root or 
/user - which doesn't mean you can't create them if you want. Also, as 
you understood, /swap as slice does not exist, because that's a separate 
partition.

If you are not sure what slices you need, you can use the "automatic" 
option during FreeBSD install to use the defaults. Often, however, you 
may find that some other arrangement might better suit your intended use 
of the machine.

On a "typical" server, nowadays, I set up the slices like this:

/		128 MB
/var		2 GB
/var/tmp	256 MB
/usr		4 GB
/storage	(all the rest)

Then I symlink /tmp to /var/tmp. If there will be considerable amount of 
users, then I create /storage/home and symlink /home to that. Also 
/storage is used for various purposes depending of the tasks that the 
server performs, such as /storage/www for webpages, /storage/mail for 
mailboxes, /storage/share for Samba shares etc.



> The books I’ve read so far really don’t relate a whole lot in this regard.

Partitioning/slicing is largely a religious issue and everyone believes 
their choice is The Right One, so the archives of this mailing list 
might provide you with more material than you can digest :)

> If I need to span a partition over more than one hard drive how is this done? If I were to make a large /user partition over small drives, how are these partition extensions set up? Again the books don’t relate how this is done during an installation.

In the days of FreeBSD 4.x, I used vinum for such purposes. In 5.x, as I 
understand, there is gvinum for the same task, but I haven't used that. 
I much prefer hardware RAID adapters.

-- 
Toomas Aas