FreeBSD Install config

[Jonathan Perkin]

[ Format fixed, wrap lines at 72 chars if possible in your mail client ]

On Wed Dec 19, 2001 at 01:08:23PM +0000, mark.stewart at bacs.co.uk wrote:

> Can someone advise me on how to split up the hard disk sensibly in
> working FreeBSD machines. I know this is individual to most users but
> I'm sure there must be some standard practices used that experienced
> admins have learned from experience ??? 

You're probably just going to get a lot of personal opinions :)

I generally go for around 128Mb root filesystem, you certainly shouldn't
need more than that, and if possible mount it read-only.  On my NetBSD
machines I make it smaller (usually 64Mb).  The general idea is to
minimise writes to the root filesystem, therefore reducing the chance
of corruption.  If you can keep / in a healthy working order you will
always have enough tools around to fix any problems you might run into
with other filesystems.

Then comes swap.  The 2 * (amount of ram) rule has been around for years
and is still pretty spot-on.  If you're like me and also have /tmp
mounted on swap you can make it slightly bigger.  Also can't hurt to
increase size anyway, diskspace is cheap and running out of swap isn't
something you want to run into.

The size of /var depends on how you organise stuff.  Putting stuff like
named(8) zonefiles in here to make a read-only root filesystem plausible
is common.  A gig is usually a safe bet (especially if you log lots).

Shouldn't need more than 4Gb for a normal /usr.  Limit stuff on it to
just checked out /usr/{src|ports} and keep cvs repositories (if you
do things that way) on /home.

/home is rest of filesystem.

tuning(7) is quite informative these days on how to actually lay the
filesystems out on the disk to take advantage of extra rotational
speed etc.

-- 
 Jonathan Perkin - BBC Internet Services - <sketch at rd.bbc.co.uk>