An installation on SCSI Drives

Malcolm Kay malcolm.kay at internode.on.net
Mon Oct 31 03:49:28 PST 2005


On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 08:56 pm, Toomas Aas wrote:
> 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.
>
Yes let's!

> 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 usual BSD terminology is just the reverse of this.
What MS calls partitions are usually known in FreeBSD terminology 
as "slices".

BSD reserves the term "partitions" for the BSD subdivision of a 
BSD device (which might, in fact, be a slice) and this predates 
MS use of the term by many years.

And while the BSD swap partition can be mounted in a different
slice it is usual for it to be a partition within a BSD slice.
And also usual (but not essential) for all the the native BSD
file systems on the one physical disk to reside in the same 
slice.

Or one can "dangerously dedicate" the entire physical drive to 
BSD and dispense entirely with slices; as in traditional BSD
systems -- but this is not generally favoured in modern times.

For the OP; in the days of rather flakey drive performance it was 
usual to make a root partition mounted on '/' of a minimum size 
to run the basic startup and maintenance and keep the remainder 
of the system in other partitions. Just how this was distributed 
tends to be somewhat dependent on the time in history. Swap is 
is almost always a separate partition that does not (in BSD) 
carry a file system in the usual sense. 

But going back a bit /usr was almost always a separate partition 
often containing the 'home' tree of user files.

The 'best' or 'optimum' depends on both the machine usage and 
what factors you consider most important.

In this day use of a separate partition for /home (and of course
one for swap) with the remainder all in the root partition '/' 
seems to be quite satisfactory for general use.

Malcolm Kay

> 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.


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