[ On Tue, February 28, 1995 at 10:06:52 (-0500), Joe Ammond wrote: ]
> Subject: Advice and/or guide to laying out filesystems?
>
> I'm rebuilding my 1.0 box, and I was curious if anyone had any advice for
> laying out filesystems and swap space.  My machine is a 486DX2/66 with 8M
> of RAM, soon to be 16.  I have two Wren IV disks attached (old large and slow,
> but they work), and I'd like to maximize them as much as possible.

/, a small swap, /usr, and maybe /var, should be on your boot spindle

More swap, /tmp, and /local, /home, etc., should be on the second
spindle.

I just think about how the system will access various files, and I try
to split major groups of file accesses across each available spindle,
minimizing potential contention as much as possible.

The secondary goal is to make filesystems for each major "sub-system"
you run, such that any one of them can run out of space, and not affect
the others, *or* the basic operation of the system.  I.e. if you have
users on the system, /home should be separate, and most users should not
have write permissions anywhere else but /tmp, /var/tmp, and /var/spool.

If you expect your system to do much paging, make as many swap partitions
as you have spindles, with the smallest ones on the busiest spindles.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734			VE3TCP		robohack!woods
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; UniForum Canada <woods@uniforum.ca>