Hi, can somebody post the result of du -h /var from a pretty vanilla 10.0 installation? The reason I am asking is I want to determine if it would be feasible to mount /var on a usb flash (512MB) for a silent server where I would like to suspend the hd. On 10.1, /var is more than 512MB, and quite a lot of the space is used by zmd . Thanks, Claes
Hi,
can somebody post the result of du -h /var from a pretty vanilla 10.0 installation? The reason I am asking is I want to determine if it would be feasible to mount /var on a usb flash (512MB) for a silent server where I would like to suspend the hd. On 10.1, /var is more than 512MB, and quite a lot of the space is used by zmd . 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
On Friday 11 August 2006 10:05 am, Claes at work wrote: old logs, wtmp and some other garbage. -- 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
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
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
On 11/08/06 08:44, Claes at work wrote:
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. All the downloads are also stored on /var, when you do an update. Even if you do not keep the update rpms, you need sufficient space to download them before they're installed.
On 8/11/06, Darryl Gregorash <raven@accesscomm.ca> 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. All the downloads are also stored on /var, when you do an update. Even if you do not keep the update rpms, you need sufficient space to download them before they're installed.
Good point. Thanks for all replies - I though 512 MB was a little too small so today I bought a cheap 1 GB flash stick and will install 10.1 with it for /var this weekend. It will be kind of an experiment. I will have to configure so that downloaded packages are stored / moved to hard drive storage. Regarding syslog, I think I can extend the life of the flash by configuring file sync parameters. Claes
On Friday 11 August 2006 09:05, Claes at work wrote: Hi, can somebody post the result of du -h /var from a pretty vanilla 10.0 installation? The reason I am asking is I want to determine if it would be feasible to mount /var on a usb flash (512MB) for a silent server where I would like to suspend the hd. On 10.1, /var is more than 512MB, and quite a lot of the space is used by zmd . Thanks, Claes ********************************************************************** SuSE Linux 9.3 (i586) superking:~ # du -sh /var 234M /var SUSE LINUX 10.1 (i586) bender:~ # du -sh /var 253M /var bender:~ # du -sh /var/run/zmd;du -sh /var/lib/zmd;du -sh /var/cache/zmd 0 /var/run/zmd 12M /var/lib/zmd 0 /var/cache/zmd What is expected to be the advantage of using a removeable flash drive for mounting /var?
On Friday 11 August 2006 16:05, Claes at work wrote:
Hi,
can somebody post the result of du -h /var
owl:/var # nice -+19 du -sh 352M . Suse 10.1 Biggest dirs are: owl:/var # du . | sort -rn | head -20 359492 . 127424 ./log 116632 ./lib 103780 ./log/YaST2 58004 ./lib/rpm 57152 ./adm 56172 ./adm/backup 56132 ./adm/backup/rpmdb 28072 ./cache 25208 ./tmp 21888 ./lib/zmd 20668 ./lib/zypp 20476 ./lib/zypp/cache 15052 ./cache/beagle 14072 ./lib/zypp/cache/Source.nzrVQa 14008 ./cache/beagle/indexes 13952 ./lib/zypp/cache/Source.nzrVQa/DATA 13932 ./lib/zypp/cache/Source.nzrVQa/DATA/descr 12632 ./tmp/kdecache-simone 9792 ./cache/beagle/indexes/documentation -- ----- stephan@s11n.net http://s11n.net "...pleasure is a grace and is not obedient to the commands of the will." -- Alan W. Watts
Fri, 11 Aug 2006, by claesatwork@gmail.com:
Hi,
can somebody post the result of du -h /var from a pretty vanilla 10.0 installation? The reason I am asking is I want to determine if it would be feasible to mount /var on a usb flash (512MB) for a silent server where I would like to suspend the hd. On 10.1, /var is more than 512MB, and quite a lot of the space is used by zmd .
For a workstation system: $ df -h /var Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/system-lv2 5.0G 1.1G 4.0G 22% /var But there's no such thing as a "vanilla" SUSE install I think, this figure here isn't even remotely comperable to the server I admin at $DAYJOB, which is also "vanilla" 10.0. Be adviced though, that flashdisks are not suiteable to be written many times. They typically can be used for 10s of thousands of writes cycles, not many millions like normal drives. I would suggest that you at least write logs to a remote syslog daemon. Theo -- Theo v. Werkhoven Registered Linux user# 99872 http://counter.li.org ICBM 52 13 26N , 4 29 47E. + ICQ: 277217131 SUSE 9.2 + Jabber: muadib@jabber.xs4all.nl Kernel 2.6.8 + See headers for PGP/GPG info. Claimer: any email I receive will become my property. Disclaimers do not apply.
participants (7)
-
Claes＠work -
Darryl Gregorash -
Jan Engelhardt -
Jerry Feldman -
stephan beal -
Theo v. Werkhoven -
Wade Jones