On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 01:38:35AM -0800, Dino Vliet wrote: > Hi there, > > I've installed freebsd 4.9 and am currently busy with > installing third party apps through the ports > collection. > What worries me however is the size of my /var > directory. You might consider symlinking /var to /usr/var perhaps - unless you have any other spare space that you can allocate to the /var fs - 67MB is quite small, especially if you intend to use any databases at any point in time.
The best way to go about symlinking /var to somewhere else is to go into single user mode at boot time (or kill all processes that use anything under /var), move /var to /usr/var and then symlink /var to /usr/var. This isn't really the best solution in terms of performance (although you wouldn't notice on a low load system), but unless you have extra free disk space you can allocate to /var or are prepared to reinstall - allocating more space to /var in the installation - then the symlinking option is viable. > I also had to get rid of a pkg.db file in the > /var/db/pkg directory because it took a lot of space. As a note, the pkg.db file is quite important - port installations register themselves in the /var/db/pkg/pkg.db database and this is used to check on dependencies etc, a little bit like the windows registry is used (only a little!). Generally deleting files from under /var isn't the best solution :P > q1) Do I have to worry about my /var<directory Yes, FreeBSD uses the /var filesystem to log things to (/var/log), to keep check on the state of daemons (/var/state, /var/run), to lock files (/var/lock) and numerous other things. Not to mention that databases are by default installed into /var/db/mysql for example in the case of mysql. Generally the /var filesystem is very important for the day-to-day running of a FreeBSD system. > q2) How can I get rid of files I don't need (like > XFree86.0.log..) As mentioned above it's generally not a good idea to delete files from /var/ on an ad-hoc basis. A better plan: organize a logfile rotation policy so that old logfiles are rotated out of /var/log into a backup location which has enough space. See the manpage on newsyslog for info on this. configure daemons so that they only log what is absolutely necessary for your needs. -- Jez Hancock - System Administrator / PHP Developer http://munk.nu/ http://jez.hancock-family.com/ - personal weblog http://ipfwstats.sf.net/ - ipfw peruser traffic logging _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
