cvs commit: src/sys/conf kern.post.mk

[Brooks Davis]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 10:17:53AM +0100, Robert Watson wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Sep 2005, Garance A Drosehn wrote:
> 
> >I must admit I'm a little uneasy moving /usr and /var into '/', just 
> >because I'm so used to the way it is.  I really *like* having /var as a 
> >separate partition.  But hard disks are huge compared to how they used 
> >to be, so I don't mind having a 500-meg '/'.  I *do* save the 
> >kernel.debug information in my /boot/kernel's, and my root partition is 
> >still under 50% full.
> 
> We probably ought to move this discussion to another list, but -- I 
> remember two very specific occasions where I first realized how important 
> an isolated /var is:
> 
> (1) In about 1995, when I first started using ppp, I discovered the
>     hard way that the default logging level was set a bit high, and filled
>     the entire hard disk with log records in a couple of days.  Don't
>     remember which FreeBSD revision that was.  It's amazing how little
>     time it takes, if you get a log messsage ever second or so, to fill up
>     a hard disk.

I've also hit cases where the log come in so fast that you can fill a
1GB /var fast enough that newsyslog never has a chance to compress the
log.  My particular case appears to be a program trying to dump core
when not fully paged in and when the executable was on nfs, but has been
deleted.  I've trained my users not to delete there executables so fast
and that seem to have stopped the problems, but I haven't had a chance
to find a way to trigger the bug in the lab.  I've found it on 4.x, but
wouldn't be suprised if it effects all systems.  The killer is that it
generates two log messages per fault as fast as it can fault so while
the file compresses very nicely, syslog's repeated line compression
doesn't work. :(

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
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