Partitioning drives for FreeBSD install

[MrSparkle]

Last time I tried to install FreeBSD I noticed by default it proposes you make about 5 different partitions like /home/, /usr/ and all that bullshit. I usually just make 1 partition for my linux installs so I'm not used to all that /home/, /usr/ partition bullshit but I decided to let it go ahead and make those partitions and it wiped out my windows partition for some reason.

I don't care because it left the linux partition intact which was SDA1, Windows was SDA2 but I know I specified that BSD partition SDA4 so I have no idea why it reformatted SDA2.

Anyway I was wondering if all those different subpartitions are necessary for installing BSD or can you just install it onto 1 partition like I do with linux?

[Kamisama]

1 partition is all you need.
I prefer to allow these to exist:

/ (root director)
/home
/usr
/var
/tmp

/home is typically under 4.7 GB in order to back it all up to a DVD
/usr is about 6GB+ to install programs in
/var is about 4GB+ to download programs
/tmp is about 3GB+ for whatever misc. crap i might be playing with and needs that much

If anything, have the root and the home (two partitions).
/
/home

It's really nice to be able to backup /home onto a DVD.

[Prometheum]

You can install it onto one partition, but FreeBSD is much more enterprise-oriented, hence the recommendation. You can use it as a desktop, sure, but not as easily, and it doesn't get really cool or have any different features from Gnu/Linux until you start having enough hard drives to play with zfs/gmirror/gpool, or have tons of jails, or have "NEAR LINEAR SMP CAPABILITIES" or all of that.

BSD partitioning is slightly different than everything else. You choose a slice, and then make partitions within that slice. The slice is recognized as a single partition by most other things.

Originally Posted by Kamisama

1 partition is all you need.
I prefer to allow these to exist:

/ (root director)
/home
/usr
/var
/tmp

/home is typically under 4.7 GB in order to back it all up to a DVD
/usr is about 6GB+ to install programs in
/var is about 4GB+ to download programs
/tmp is about 3GB+ for whatever misc. crap i might be playing with and needs that much

If anything, have the root and the home (two partitions).
/
/home

It's really nice to be able to backup /home onto a DVD.

You do know /home is just a symlink to /usr/home in FreeBSD?
Why not simply set quotas on whoever is using the system rather than using two different *partition* for the same parent directory?


Also 6Gb is way too much for /usr.
And why in the world would you need 4Gb for /var, there is not even a single executable in /var, only logs, backups, runs, mail, cron and a few other things.

[Prometheum]

Originally Posted by zeusy

You do know /home is just a symlink to /usr/home in FreeBSD?
Why not simply set quotas on whoever is using the system rather than using two different *partition* for the same parent directory?


Also 6Gb is way too much for /usr.
And why in the world would you need 4Gb for /var, there is not even a single executable in /var, only logs, backups, runs, mail, cron and a few other things.

Mail is a big reason. Also, www, ftp, and other services have canonical points in /var. Backups alone are a good reason for it to be nice and big.

6GB is way too big for /usr, but a bit on the small side for /usr/local. Keeping in mind that /usr includes /home, the ports tree, and /usr/local, 6BG is fairly small.

Are these partitioning schemes for really small drives or something? 4.7G is a tiny home.

Originally Posted by Prometheum

Mail is a big reason. Also, www, ftp, and other services have canonical points in /var. Backups alone are a good reason for it to be nice and big.

6GB is way too big for /usr, but a bit on the small side for /usr/local. Keeping in mind that /usr includes /home, the ports tree, and /usr/local, 6BG is fairly small.

Are these partitioning schemes for really small drives or something? 4.7G is a tiny home.

A full FreeBSD install (including source) is around 3Gbs, usually less, try making world/distri and installing everything there is on the 2cds.
I don't have a clue how you could get /usr/ up to 3Gb (excluding home, again), maybe you forget to make clean/distclean once in a while?

It his very unlikely /var will need more than 400MB.
Unless you offer some sort of shell service, such as ssh/rsh.
/var/backups is only group, aliases, and passwd backups, by default.
Yes some people uses /var/ftp and /var/www, nowadays /usr/home is more popular, particularly because of offsite hosting

df -h on my Arch Linux box:

 

Filesystem            Size   Used  Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda1             9.4G  2.6G  6.8G  28%   /

/dev/sda3             155G  43G 113G  28%   /home

[Prometheum]

Originally Posted by zeusy

A full FreeBSD install (including source) is around 3Gbs, usually less, try making world/distri and installing everything there is on the 2cds.
I don't have a clue how you could get /usr/ up to 3Gb (excluding home, again), maybe you forget to make clean/distclean once in a while?

It his very unlikely /var will need more than 400MB.
Unless you offer some sort of shell service, such as ssh/rsh.
/var/backups is only group, aliases, and passwd backups, by default.
Yes some people uses /var/ftp and /var/www, nowadays /usr/home is more popular, particularly because of offsite hosting

/usr has /usr/local. All the programs you install are installed to there. That's also the default http root, ftp root, etc. You should always have a nice big drive for /usr because of that and /home.

And yes, most web hosts have vhosts and get stuff out of your home directory, but nobody on totse is going to be setting up FreeBSD on an ENTERPRISE GRADE platform for purposes like that.