> /tmp	If you've got the RAM, some people like to make this a mfs
>         (memory filesystem) carved out of RAM.

And even if it's not a machine with a lot of RAM, making it a ramdisk is still
an interesting thing to do, as long as you make sure it's backed with 
swapspace. So increase the swapspace with the amount of diskspace you had in
mind for /tmp. As long as we don't have tmpfs, a RAMdisk is a lot faster
than a softdep filesystem, even if this means the ramdisk needs to be swapped
out.

Make sure to set TMPDIR to /tmp, instead of the default /usr/tmp

> I also have /usr/local set aside as a separate partition and have set
> pkgsrc set to install pkgs to there instead of /usr/pkg.

Bah, a FreeBSDism, and one of the less useful ones IMHO. It's so simple:

Everything that I really need to get a broken system working goes to /.
Everything that the base system ships goes to /usr.
Everything that all packages install go to /usr/pkg. Or /opt. Or whatever.
Everything that *I* add manually, locally, outside the package system,
goes to /usr/local.

Combining the second and the third is a Really Bad Thing, even though Linux
seems to be doing it en masse. In fact, they throw / in the mix too. But then
again, there's many things that Linux doesn't do right, according to my
humble opinion.

Combining the last two trees is a Real Bad Thing, even though FreeBSD seems to
do it. The two biggest reasons for this are:

1) The whole idea of having a package system is that it will keep track of
   conflicting files, and that it will enable you to cleanly remove a package.
   This *only* works reliably if pkgsrc - or whatever packaging system - is the
   only one meddling around with it. So, as far as I'm concerned, /usr/pkg is
   read-only, and not for me to make changes to. 

2) /usr/local (My manual additions to the system) is one of those few 
   directories that make "this" machine unique. /bin is not unique, /usr
   is not unique, /usr/pkg isn't that unique either. All can be reinstalled
   using resources on the web. So there is less need to backup those.

   However, /var, /etc, /home, /usr/local, and a few others *do* make the
   distinction between *my* machine and yours, and are therefore "worthy of
   backup". By combining /usr/pkg and /usr/local, I'd have to backup
   everything. And yes, that means that I usually make some symlinks from
   /usr/pkg to a dir in /usr/local, if that's required. Apache comes to mind.

   And yes, I've set PKG_SYSCONFBASE to point outside /usr/pkg.