Partition naming conventions

[Joerg Sonnenberger]

The comments are for general purpose, I believe you know all this Matt :)

On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 05:56:09PM -0800, Matthew Dillon wrote:
>     If you have a large system, it is often a good idea to separate
>     out oft-written directories such as /usr/obj, and to make /tmp
>     larger.  /var/tmp is usually made a softlink to /tmp.

The alternative for /tmp is to have lots of swap and MFS for /tmp.
This is often faster and avoids the lots of old crap in /tmp problem.
In that case you should make /var/tmp its own partition. In general
/tmp and /var/tmp as world writable locations should be on partitions
on there own. Making /usr/obj a filesystem of its own has the advantage
of faster cleaning -- just unmount, newfs and remount it :)

[snap]
>     As a point of reference, here is how I have the main DragonFly machine
>     setup:
> 
> crater:/usr/local/www> df
> Filesystem            1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> /dev/da0s1a              128990    95894    22778    81%    /
> /dev/da0s2e            13419070   119686 12225860     1%    /news
> /dev/da0s2f            13419070   501394 11844152     4%    /rdbms
> /dev/da0s2h            13419070  1234660 11110886    10%    /ftp
> /dev/da0s1f              257998    46604   190756    20%    /tmp
> /dev/da0s1h            12783794  3214364  8546728    27%    /usr
> /dev/da0s2g            13419070     2700 12342846     0%    /usr/local/www/site
> /dev/da0s1e              257998    83320   154040    35%    /var
> /dev/da0s1g             1032142     1896   947676     0%    /var/spool
> /dev/da1s1e             4129310  1493872  2305094    39%    /usr/src
> /dev/da1s1f            66437000   443838 60678202     1%    /cvs
> procfs                        4        4        0   100%    /proc
> 
>     e.g. the machine does a lot of mail routing but does not have many
>     actual accounts, hence /var/spool is broken out.  The machine runs
>     a significant web server hence /usr/local/www/site.  The machine
>     runs a news server hence /news, and an ftp server hence /ftp.  I
>     made the root too small (128MB isn't quite sufficient for comfort).

Well 128 MB leaves enough space for a backup kernel with modules, but not
more :)

Another advantage of having /news and /var/spool is to allow smaller
block sizes since those filesystem tend to have mostly very small files
and that's why many Linux NNTP admin tend to prefer ReiserFS :)

Joerg

> 
>     I backup all of these partitions independantly... in fact, my backup
>     policities pretty much governed how I set the partitions up.
> 
> 					-Matt
> 					Matthew Dillon 
> 					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>