New user - small file server questions and quick GUI question

[Roland Smith]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 06:37:25PM +0200, Kaya Saman wrote:
> [...]
> >
> > What is not unusual is to symlink /home e.g:
> >
> > # ln -s /usr/home /home
> >
> > ditto for /tmp.  i.e you remove all the stuff that uses up space from
> > the root partition.
> >
> > So the only slices you need are /, /usr, /var and swap.
> >
> > How I'd slice up the disk:
> >
> > 2GB for /
> > 2GB for swap
> > 2GB for /var
> > 34GB for /usr
> >   
> 
> Ah so BSD is slightly different from Linux in the fact that it needs to 
> have /var and /usr filesystems separate??

It doesn't _need_ to have separate filesystems. It is just convenient. If you
want to stick everything (apart from swap) on a single / partition, you can do
so. If that is wise is another thing. :-) If your server will never hold much
data (e.g. just a router/firewall) it would probably be fine.

It depends on the use you want to put the machine to, and if/where you expect
to store a lot of stuff. For my desktop I tend to put /home on a separate
partition because that is where most of my data is. 

For a server I would put the big directories where the data is stored on
separate partitions. E.g. the DocumentRoot for your Apache webserver. Or
whereever the place is where an SQL server stores its data.

> The /home partition then is very similar to Solaris in that /export/home 
> is considered the user directory. Means BSD stores /home in /usr/home??

If you don't make a separate /home partition, sysinstall will indeed default
to making /home a symlink to /usr/home, AFAIK.

For my desktop, with around 450 ports installed, I have the following lay-out;

Filesystem         Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ad4s1a        484M     93M    353M    21%    /
/dev/ad4s1g.eli    373G    168G    175G    49%    /home
/dev/ad4s1e         48G    198K     45G     0%    /tmp
/dev/ad4s1f         19G    5.8G     12G    32%    /usr
/dev/ad4s1d        1.9G    226M    1.6G    12%    /var

For swap space (/dev/ad4s1b), I reserved 2x the size of the RAM.

The 'Used' column should give you an idea of the minimum space needed for
different filesystems. Keep in mind that disk space is relatively cheap, and
it is much better to have lots of free space then to run out of space!

This division makes it easy to use dump(8) for backup purposes of /, /usr and
/var.  I do this so it is easy to restore(8) to a functioning system, and keep
the size of the dumps reasonably small, although /usr is getting prtty
big. Maybe next time I will split off /usr/local (for ports) into a separate
filesystem.

For big filesystems dump(8) takes a long time and needs a lot of space. I
prefer to back those up with rsync(1).

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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