[H-GEN] altering disk partitions

alex_del@bigpond.net.au alextdel at bigpond.net.au
Wed Mar 26 17:19:37 EST 2003


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I didn't think my question warranted a new thread, and it refers to the 
text below. So here's dumb newbie question number 256 in an infinite 
series!

IDE drives are labelled hda, hdb etc. SCSI devices and CD drives use 
sda etc. What is md0? what is ad0s?
Are these alias names given to hd's and sd's by the sys admin? 


----- Original Message -----
From: Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net>
Date: Wednesday, March 19, 2003 1:31 pm
Subject: Re: [H-GEN] altering disk partitions 

> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug 
> and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will 
> vanish. ]
> 
> 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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