On Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 05:55:27PM +0100, Igor Sobrado wrote: > Hello. [snip]
> 2. Are the sizes of the filesystems right ones? I am thinking on > > - "/var" (on the installation booklet provided with the OS > it is recommended a size of 200 MB for this filesystem, > I *never* found a /var filesystem larger than 10-20 MB). > Can it really be so large? Don't some of the database ports install into /var? It seems to me that you're not running one, so it's probably not an issue. I've made the mistake before of only allocating a gigabyte of space to /var and then had someone install a database that eats up close to 80% of that. Needless to say, that can cause some problems if users aren't paying attention and fill the filesystem (ISTR some database ports keeping log files in the same filesystem as the data files by default). If you have any applications writing logs to /var, you may want to take a look at how much data they're writing in a given amount of time. I've seen systems where /var is large enough most of the time, but as soon as someone turns on the debugging flags for an application, /var is filled extremely quickly. Also, savecore will write crash dumps to /var/core by default, so you'll need to allocate at least as much space as you have RAM if you want to capture that information. [snip] > - "/usr/ports" (is 512 MB enough for it?) I usually stay > at binary packages, but sometimes I need to build software > from source and would like to know the recommended space > for this filesystem. I'm most likely doing something improperly, but if you're not careful about cleaning up after yourself, you can easily leave object files lying around in /usr/ports and run out of space during a large build. I don't separate out /usr/ports, but I typically allocate at least 10 gigabytes to /usr. Then again, that's for a workstation with a lot of dev. tools installed. [snip] > 3. Any though about the filesystem layout? I know that it is > certainly complex, but worked nicely for me in the last years. > All these filesystems (except /var/tmp) are recommended in > the documentation and, as I said, I do not remember any of > these filesystem growing up to 60% in either space or inodes > usage in the last years... but I never did a full rebuild > of the operating system nor installed large packages from > source code (mwm is soo nice, and it comes in the official > CD-ROMs!) It seems to me that you have a relatively large number of filesystems present. This may cause you problems in the future if you're using that as a standard layout in a heterogeneous environment. I typically create only five filesystems: /, /usr, /var, /home and /tmp. > ...I do not need a large /usr/local either. I just install mwm, > firefox, nmh and a LaTeX distribution. Most utilities I need come > with the operating system (nearly all, and for making figures I like > MetaPost that comes with the LaTeX distribution.) No problem at all > with these filesystems: its size is highly site dependent, but very > easy to work out for me. As I said, I usually do not install third > party applications. > > Thanks a lot for reading this post. > > Igor. I've had the misfortune of running AIX for a short time and am aware of how Veritas Volume Manager encapsulates disks, but what's the equivalent in OpenBSD? One benefit of those systems is that they allow you to resize filesystems on the fly, which is helpful if you're not sure how much space you're going to need. I sometimes end up performing two installs. The first one lets me see how much space the OS distribution is likely to occupy and I then use those numbers when I redo the install. HTH. -Damian
