New user - small file server questions and quick GUI question

[Roland Smith]

On Fri, Jan 01, 2010 at 11:41:04PM +0200, Kaya Saman wrote:
> Hi Roland,
> 
> many thanks for the response!!! :-)

You're welcome!
 
> I waited until I had a test server setup and at least now I do......
> 
> In fact I think from my usage perspective FreeBSD is not that difficult 
> to understand!!!

If you're used to Solaris of Linux, it should be familiar. But there are some
differences in details.

> I now have a test machine setup which I built nano and Bind 9.6.1 from 
> the ports collection and I have ntp and nfs setup too.
> 
> I am currently wondering what to do about the disk space as nothing is used:
> 
> test# df -h
> Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> /dev/ad0s1a     34G    1.2G     30G     4%    /
> devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
> devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /var/named/dev
> 
> If I create separate partitions for /var /usr and /tmp I am sure that I 
> won't need that much unless I have a totally dynamic file system which 
> will grow over time.

You do realize that changing partitions will destroy your filesystems? Just so
you know. :-)

> But with minimal usage just to transfer the off 
> file but mainly read files from as now the users are going down to 1 
> machine (just me) so I think with 2GB I can probably get away with it 
> for each filesystem???
> 
> What do you say?

It really depends on what you want to do with it... How many ports do you want
to install? What kind of servers do you want to run? How much data will the
users generate/store? All these questions have an impact, and nobody can
answer them for you. :-)

You could leave it as it is for now, and just use the machine for a while, and
see how big the different directories get over time. (hint; use du(1) to check
the size of all files under a directory) Once you've got a feeling for how
much space you need, you can backup your data (config files and user data) and
do a new install where you partition the disk properly. That's the best way
IMO.

> P.s. The good part with this is that I'm only using 23MB or memory too 
> which is incredible considering that Linux or Solaris would take so much 
> more. This is kinda cool......

You can reduce memory usage somewhat more by building a kernel that only
contains the drivers that you need compiled in, and nothing else. If you don't
build kernel modules, it will save some disk space as well.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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