A New FreeBSD Server

[Mike Meyer]

In <449D8616.5040306 at tamara-b.org>, Bob Richards <bob at tamara-b.org> typed:
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> Hi Folks:
> 
> This is my first post here. I believe it is the correct list for my questions. If not,
> please excuse me and direct me to the proper list.
> 
> I have been using Linux as my WorkStation since V0.98 Kernel, so I know a bit about NIX's
> I am giving up on Linux for various reasons which I won't go into here.
> 
> I am setting up a Dell 2400 Server for FreeBSD use. I ordered the Big $79.00 CD/Manual set
> for 6.1, and it should arrive in a few days. In the mean time I am setting up the server.
> 
> The Dell, a dual CPU machine, has a PERC 2/Si controler, with 6 17GB drives. I am in the
> process of verifying/formating the individual drives as I type. The next step will be to
> create containers, which will appear as DRIVES to the new OS.
> 
> My question is what is the best configuration for FreeBsd? I want some form of RAID, and
> as fast a file system as is possible. I will be doing a very COMPLETE install, as I like
> to do things like switch from KDE to Gnome once in a while, and have tons of office-type
> apps. I need a full "C" development system, as well as a complete FreePascal setup. My CVS
> Repository is around 10GB, and my Home dir currently has 10GB of additional stuff :-(

One of the things I like about FreeBSD is that it installs the
developer tools. One of the goals is (or was?) that a base install
should be able to rebuild the system. So you get a complete C
environment when you install the system. Likewise, packages don't come
in "user" and "dev" variants - if you install something, you get the
complete package, including all the things needed to compile code
against the package.

> Swap drive, should probably be a piece of one of the 17GB drives (NO RAID) the Box has
> 500MB ram......

Why not RAID your swap? The extra reliability might not be worth very
much, but the extra performance couldn't hurt - unless you don't plan
on swapping at all. This is enough of a win that the swap subsystem
will interleave swap usage across multiple drives, a facility that
predates RAID. If you just split your swap across multiple drives, you
get RAID0 behavior from swap.

The other constraint on swap is that if you want the system to save a
core dump if it panics, you need a device to dump on that's 64Kb
bigger than ram. That's one device, not all of swap.

FreeBSD has memory-backed file systems that use swap (I don't know if
Linux has those or not), and it's generally a performance win to mount
transient file systems on such. Doing this with /tmp and /var is
common enough that there are rc.conf knobs to do this automatically at
boot time.  Those typically come from swap, with a variety of ways of
allocating memory. See the "md" man page for details. So you can get
that use out of swap, even if your processes don't swap much.

You may be a little light on the ram. My desktop runs just fine in
512Mb, but I don't run GUI-heavy things like Gnome or KDE. I'd plan to
add more RAM if I were you, because adding RAM is easy. Reconfiguring
your disk system to add more swap so you can still get core dumps is
noticably harder. So you might want to pretend you're allocating swap
for a machine with a gig of ram, and put two 1gig+64K swap partitions
on different spindles.

	<mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.