[H-GEN] altering disk partitions

Greg Black gjb at gbch.net
Tue Mar 18 22:31:03 EST 2003


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Mark Suter wrote:

> > For home based systems these days I tend to just make a small boot partition
> > then put everything else on a single large partition.  It avoids the
> > problems you have just run into... no space in /usr and heaps in /home.
> 
> Yes.  Here's the "df -h" from my current home system:
> 
>     Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
>     /dev/md0               11G  5.0G  5.1G  50% /
>     /dev/md1               64G   18G   47G  28% /home

As far as I can tell, from quick reading of the messages in this
thread, everybody has given a different and quite correct
answer.  This is, after all, one of the great examples of Unix
flexibility -- and we are all in different situations with
slightly different needs.

Here's the df -h on the box I'm using right now:

    Filesystem    Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
    /dev/ad0s1a    93M    32M    53M    38%    /
    /dev/ad0s1g   2.3G   1.1G   1.1G    50%    /usr
    /dev/ad0s1e   496M    39M   417M     9%    /var
    /dev/ad0s1f   496M    63M   394M    14%    /tmp
    /dev/ad2s1e    36G   8.3G    25G    25%    /org

The two disks also each have half a Gbyte of (unused) swap
space.

The /org partition is where all the local organisation's data
and private software lives (it's often called /home, but in this
case /home is a symlink to /org/home).  It's kept separate so
that un upgrade or change of OS can be accomplished without
disturbing the real purpose of the machine.  On machines that
are used by humans (as distinct from servers, gateways, routers,
etc., that don't have interactive logins), there usually should
be a separate partition for this stuff and it should be as big
as possible.

And, although it's not apparent from that df output, this allows
me to have several different OS installations that all mount the
same /org and allow me to work normally from different systems
if I so wish.

The reason for separate /var and /tmp is to impose simple quotas
on them and to easily apply different backup strategies to them
with dump -- I never backup either on this box; on some machines
where I want to preserve logs, I do backup /var.  If you don't
care about this, you won't do it.

Separation of / and /usr is mainly because I've always done it
that way and find it useful.  In particular, it allows me to
mount /usr read-only and to avoid backing up /usr altogether
since it's trivial to restore from distribution media if it's
ever needed.

My preference for not having to consider certain partitions for
backups is a consequence of the fact that, on a basic FreeBSD
installation for a workstation, I have over 130,000 files in
/usr and backups can be much faster if none of them are ever
even contemplated.

That number of files pales into insignificance when compared
with the half million files in /org, but that's where the active
work happens, and so that's where I'm happy for backup processes
to take their time.

Anyway, as you can see, there's more than one way to skin this
particular cat.

Greg

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