On Friday 11 August 2006 10:44 am, Claes at work wrote:
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. My /var is: 669M /var But, there are archived log files going back over a year, so you should be able to do it with a 512M removable, and with a bit of management, you should be able to keep it well within the allowable size.
You could also put the spool directory on the HD. -- Jerry Feldman <gaf@blu.org> Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9