OT: redhat

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Nov 04, 2004, Bill Vermillion wrote:
>press any key to reboot  -oops- Fairlight said on Thu, Nov 04 18:22  
....
...
>The problem with /var being the mount for spool on anything other
>than a smaller business system is you will rapidly run out of 
>room in a default install.
>
>I symlilk /var/spool/mail to /usr/mail.

We switched to Maildir mail storage a couple of years ago, and this problem
goes away as each user's mailbox is in their $HOME directory.  This also
makes it trivial to maintain user quotas that include their mail storage.

>This AM a client with one mail account that gets copies of EVERY
>mail to anyone at their company called and said he couldn't get any
>mail.
>
>I watched and the problem was that by the time the file was copied
>to the .xxx.pop file for tranmission his MS device had timed out.
>Normally that all-in-one account was accessed once each week
>and archived to DVD.   But it grew large and this AM when he 
>called and I watched it was at about 950MB.  I just checked a
>moment ago and it was 1.015GB.   So when I get it split and he gets
>it in place, his archiving will now become twice a week.
>
>If you are wondering why the file is so large, it is for an
>invesigatory firm and there are large documents, still photographs,
>and video files.    That and on other place are while the mail
>limits are so large - 50MB per mail message :-).  

An even better argument for Maildir as each message is in a separate file
which eliminates file locking problems as well as the issues of rewriting
huge BSD mail files.

...
>And I still see many in the Linux and FreeBSD world advocating
>one large filesystem for everything.  The day they corrupt the 
>/ filesystem, and it is the only system, perhaps they will see the
>error of their ways.
>
>In multiple filesystem systems [that is not redunant] except for
>full HD failure, I've never lost / AND the other file systems.

We create a separate file system for a mirror of the root file system
(/etc/fstab is slightly different).  This permits us to boot into the
backup partition in case the primary is corrupted, and also makes upgrades
far safer as there's always a fall back available.  Typically on Linux
systems we have four partitions on the first hard drive, swap, ``/'',
``/backroot'', and ``/home'' with /usr/local symlinked to /home/local.

We also run most server software under OpenPKG, with it's own var
directory, and this is typically in the /home file system.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
UUCP:               camco!bill  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
URL: http://www.celestial.com/

``Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in speeches.''
    Will Rogers