How should I arrange my partitions for Solaris9 on Ultra2?

[Cooky]

Hi all,
I have an old Sun Ultra2 w/ a 5GB HD. How should I arrange the partitions?? After reading some of the docs on the web it seems that I should have:
/, swap, /tmp, /var, /usr, /opt, /export/home, and/or home.
I'm going to use this as a regular workstation for software development or maybe mail server, nothing fancy. What kind of partitions should I have and how big for each of them??
Please help as I'm new to Unix and I'm clueless...

 

[Abzstrak]

I personally would just make a /swap (whatever size makes sense for the amount of RAM you have, an /export/home of like 1GB, and a / of the rest... I dont think is exactly the "solaris way" but it should work fine... at any rate I wouldn't bother making /tmp and /opt partitions since your a bit tight on space

 

[Nothinman]

I would just install Debian =)

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I would just install Debian =)

variety is the spice of life

 

[Sunner]

I'd go with one big root filesystem, and of course, a swap slice, no need for any fancy partitioning scheme on a regular workstation.

 

[FUBAR]

Just an FYI for solaris partitioning... Your /tmp directory is going to be your swap slice. You may be able to manually create a /tmp partition, but by default it's swap. Here's some of the df output from our server:

Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/md/dsk/d1 2463967 2006900 407788 84% /
/proc 0 0 0 0% /proc
fd 0 0 0 0% /dev/fd
mnttab 0 0 0 0% /etc/mnttab
/dev/md/dsk/d3 577351 195006 324610 38% /var
swap 1654552 24 1654528 1% /var/run
/dev/md/dsk/d0 183395947 129499078 52062910 72% /export
swap 1654872 344 1654528 1% /tmp

This means that /tmp also clears on every reboot, unlike a linux box where /tmp is actually static. So don't put anything important in there and expect it to be around next time

 

[Nothinman]

variety is the spice of life

Yes but consistency makes management easier =)

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: FUBAR
Just an FYI for solaris partitioning... Your /tmp directory is going to be your swap slice. You may be able to manually create a /tmp partition, but by default it's swap. Here's some of the df output from our server:

Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/md/dsk/d1 2463967 2006900 407788 84% /
/proc 0 0 0 0% /proc
fd 0 0 0 0% /dev/fd
mnttab 0 0 0 0% /etc/mnttab
/dev/md/dsk/d3 577351 195006 324610 38% /var
swap 1654552 24 1654528 1% /var/run
/dev/md/dsk/d0 183395947 129499078 52062910 72% /export
swap 1654872 344 1654528 1% /tmp

This means that /tmp also clears on every reboot, unlike a linux box where /tmp is actually static. So don't put anything important in there and expect it to be around next time

You reboot?! :Q

Ill have to take a look at one of the 30billion solaris machines we have at work to see if that is how it is setup for us too.

 

[Cooky]

Thanks for y'all's feedback.
I've set up the partitions and given the largest portion to / as some of you suggested.

 

[Nothinman]

This means that /tmp also clears on every reboot, unlike a linux box where /tmp is actually static.

On Debian a boot script clears out all the tmp directories, so it's not static. Although I reboot so infrequently it doesn't really matter.

 

[FUBAR]

You reboot?!

Occasionally... like when installing tape backup drives and your manager puts (or was going to put anyway) the backup script in the /tmp dir

I could be wrong on 9, it's like that for 7 and 8. I seem to remember our SSE telling me that too before I checked the df once.