[gentoo-amd64] Re: New install, /var on tmpfs

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Tonko Mulder <tonko.mulder@gmail.com> posted
200802061253.45910.tonko.mulder@gmail.com, excerpted below, on  Wed, 06
Feb 2008 12:53:37 +0100:

> Op Wednesday 06 February 2008 11:19:46 schreef Duncan:
> 
>> FWIW, I have /tmp on tmpfs, and /var/tmp as a symlink pointing at it.

> Don't know what 'FWIW' is, but anyway :)

http://www.onelook.com/?w=fwiw&ls=a

For What It's Worth.  (FWIW... I don't use too many IM/list-speak 
acronyms and tend to dislike reading posts from those that do, but I use 
a few common ones, FWIW, BTW=By The Way, smilies, etc.) 

> Thanks for the info and I'll try that when I'm ready to boot.. ( I
> wasn't thinking and I created a lvm root partition :P )

=8^\ 

I've never done that, tho I understand it's workable if you have 
/boot separate and an initramfs/initrd with lvm2 therein, but I spent 
QUITE some time planning my system so it wasn't necessary, putting 
root and rootbak (if one fails I can boot the other, I update the backup 
only periodically, when I know the main one is working well) on 
partitioned RAID-6, specifically to AVOID root on lvm.  Unlike lvm, the 
kernel can pickup md/RAID parameters from its command line and can boot 
into it directly, so that's how I have it arranged, /boot on RAID-1 as 
that's all the RAID grub can handle, root and rootbak, along with the 
physical volume for my LVM for everything else redundancy critical on 
partitioned RAID-6, and 4-way striped swap and RAID-0 for caches (ccache, 
the Gentoo tree, /usr/src/linux/) that are speed but not redundancy 
critical.

The root and rootbak partitions contain most of /usr and /var as well, 
basically everything that gets touched by ebuilds and the package manager 
including its data, so it all stays in sync.  If I were doing it over, 
the only two things I'd do differently would be to have two rootbaks, so 
if the system crashed while I was writing the one backup and neither it 
nor the primary working root were functional, I could still boot the 
other backup, and I'd create my RAID using at least 5 spindles/drives 
(but go lower end on capacity per spindle), as writing to a 4-way RAID-6 
is slowwwww.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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