On 8/11/06, Jerry Feldman <gaf@blu.org> wrote:
That's a bad idea. /var contains log files, spool files as well as both the utmp and wtmp files. You can certainly contain the size of the log files by removing the old logs, wtmp and some other garbage.
Perhaps I did not explain my intent well enough. Since /var contains files that will be written constantly more or less by having a system up and running (such as log files, pid files etc) I want it to reside on storage that is not rotating :-) In other words, I want it persistently stored and at the same time be able to spin down my hard drive. At least when the system is idling I know it should be possible. I already have a home server (that acts as firewall, file server, print server, dhcp server and a few other things) configured similiarily. However, instead of using flash for /var, I have mounted a few of the directories in /var (such as /var/tmp, /var/log and /var/run) on a ram disk, which I remount there short after boot. It works well for an idling server, the hard drive is suspended most of the time. However, sometimes, such as when I turn on other hosts on the same network it spins up since dhcpd writes a short file somewhere outside of my ram mounts. Another program that I could not fit into my current setup are cron, and I guess there are a few more. However, most of them write to either /var or /tmp. My new idea is to mount the entire /var on a flash disk. However, size of /var has grown recently on SUSE, and I want to determine if 10.0 is feasible for this purpose since it does not include zmd example. Claes