How to minimize disk sliceing?
Terje J. Hanssen
The old question is still actually.
Sun's traditional convention for Sparc server disks has been 7 slices
for root, swap, /export, /export/swap, /opt, /usr and /export/home.
So many disk slices are vaste of unused disk space on each slice.
Therefore as few slices as possible should usual be the most flexible
and efficient disk use and backup for smaller systems with a larger disk
(> 8 GB).
But older 32 bit Sparcs has the limit of 1 GB root slice (as I will
summary), and cannot therefore utilize the newer '3 slice convention'
with one large slice for root, one for swap and one for /var.
The question is therefore: how to minimize the number of slices and
filesystems on such a server? I see only two possibilities as follows:
I can't see the reason for two slices for software /usr and /opt. It
looks like /opt is used more like /usr/local in other cases, and SUNW
packages are spread to both /usr and /opt. Why not move /opt and make a
symlink /opt to /usr/opt instead? But some packages installation have
to install in /opt and also replace the symlink with a directory. So
I'm not sure this is the right way and how to do it?
For a small server with oversightly light and few diskless clients, it
should be possible to skip the slices for /export and /export/swap, and
utilize the 1 GB server root slice. One of these slices could be used
for /var instead.
But still 5-6 slices are needed for root, swap, /var, /opt, /usr and
/export/home. Are there some smarter ways?
Terje J. Hanssen
Nordland Teknikk as
fabrice....@marchfirst.fr
<te...@nordland-teknikk.no> wrote:
>I can't see the reason for two slices for software /usr and /opt. It
>looks like /opt is used more like /usr/local in other cases, and SUNW
>packages are spread to both /usr and /opt. Why not move /opt and make a
>symlink /opt to /usr/opt instead? But some packages installation have
>to install in /opt and also replace the symlink with a directory. So
>I'm not sure this is the right way and how to do it?
Make a lofs mount instead of a symlink :
mkdir /opt
mount -F lofs /usr/opt /opt
David McCall
"Terje J. Hanssen" wrote:
>
> But still 5-6 slices are needed for root, swap, /var, /opt, /usr and
> /export/home. Are there some smarter ways?
I'm currently experimenting with once slice for /
and one slice for swap
18gig disk
Solaris 8 Ultra 250
machine seems to be in great running order.