8.0-RELEASE -> -STABLE and size of /

[Miroslav Lachman]

Jeremy Chadwick wrote:

[...]

> 2) I tend to keep a large amount of logs on systems, going back weeks if
> not months.  This is intentional; it's amazing how often a customer or
> user will ask for some information from 3 or 4 months prior.
>
> FreeBSD's Apache port out-of-the-box logs to /var/log/httpd-*, and what
> we do is mostly web content serving.  Let's also not forget about
> /var/log/maillog.  I also advocate use of /var/log/all.log.
>
> I think it's fairly well-established at this point that I focus on
> server environments and not workstations (where /var probably doesn't
> need to be anywhere near that size).  Folks should always review their
> needs, keeping expansion possibility in mind, when doing filesystem
> creation.

I keep log files (apache, lighttpd, proftpd, maillog) about 2 weeks on 
the machine (rotated daily), but I have them all for minimal 3 months on 
our central backup machine (I have most logs archived for more than 1 
year - depending on free space of the backup storage ;])

>> And why so big /tmp? I am running servers with smaller sizes for years
>> without any problem.
>
> My recommendation above doesn't imply those who don't use it will have
> problems -- each environment/system is different.
>
> That said, it's amazing how much software out there blindly uses /tmp.
> Last year I ran into this situation: an older server (1GB /tmp) started
> behaving oddly due to /tmp filling.  A user of the system was using lynx
> to download some large files (an ISO image and something else, I forget
> what).  lynx saves data its downloading to /tmp, and once it completes,
> the user is prompted where to save the data (CWD being the default).
>
> "So tune lynx to use /var/tmp or some other path" -- sure, that'd work,
> except lynx is just one of many programs which could do this.  I'd
> rather not "tune them all".  :-)  /tmp is more or less universal.

Most of our servers are without shell users and without programs like 
lynx :) So I hope I am safe with 1-2GB /tmp (I don't remember any 
accident with "no space left on device /tmp" for past 4-5 years. Maybe I 
am just lucky guy ;)

> Hope this sheds some light on my decisions.  :-)

Thank you for you explanation, it makes sense in your environment.

Miroslav Lachman