Subject: Re: need room on /
To: James K. Lowden <jklowden@schemamania.org>
From: Richard Rauch <rkr@olib.org>
List: netbsd-help
Date: 02/07/2003 22:01:25
Re. http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-help/2003/02/06/0026.html
In addition to the other comments, I would add the following:
/var is a dumping-ground for *some* (very few) applications that store
large amounts of user-data. In particular, TeX dumps its font bitmaps
there. At one point, I did a check of my TeX font data in /var,
and it was over 50MB. And, of course, /var/mail is where your mailboxes
go, so if you don't move mail somewhere else (or cause /var/mail to
be a mount-point or symlink), you can soak up disk space, there.
Some suggestions have been made to solve this. I'd add:
* Put everything on one big partition.
* If TeX is your only problem, you *can* configure it to put
its fonts in a non-default directory.
* Put /var under /usr and symlink it. (^&
* On a PC where disk space is relatively cheap and vast, I'd make
/ at least 100MB (unless it's an old PC with a tiny disk and you
can't relace the disk drive for some reason).
* On the off-chance that you've got a huge mailbox in /var/mail,
you might move that.
For reference, here's my "df -k" output:
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/wd0a 274967 42953 218265 16% /
/dev/wd0f 297447 29058 253516 10% /var
/dev/wd0e 36795954 9389811 25566345 26% /usr
kernfs 1 1 0 100% /kern
...this is on a 40GB drive. (Slightly long story, but it's the
smallest disk I could find to replace a 20GB drive that was
showing some hardware problems.)
You'll note that I tried putting /var on its own partition here.
I didn't know how much space it would need, since I don't know
when the next application will come along that thinks that
/var is its massive archival store. Lots of wasted space, but
that's okay; the disk will never fill up anyway.
--
"I probably don't know what I'm talking about." --rkr@olib.org