Re: small hdd install

From: Aaron Baugher (abaugher_at_esc.pike.il.us)
Date: 03/25/04 

Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 11:33:46 -0600

"Wayne" <wayne@domain.com> writes:

> i have 2 1gig hdd's and wanna install freebsd.
>
> the machine i am using is a p2 450mhz, 128mb ram.
>
> if i do a auto assign of the disk label my swap is set to 240mb
> which limits me greatly.

> can anyone perhaps recommend the sizes i could use ? the machine
> will be used as a small internet gateway/mailserver/webserver

That sounds like plenty of swap for those services unless you plan to
run X or some other resource hog on top of that. You might want to
try it and see how much it uses; I've run those services and more on
a lot less. On my home gateway, I've got a mail server (qmail), news
server (leafnode), NFS server, and a handful of other common services
running and it all adds up to about 72MB. Adding a webserver like
apache shouldn't increase that greatly, unless it supports a busy
site.

It's typical to set your swap at double your physical RAM, and it
sounds like that's about what it's doing. If you're actually using
all that swap and more, you'd probably be better off adding actual
RAM. The kind of add-ons that could push you into needing more
memory, like a proxy server, SQL database, or spam checker, won't be
all that happy if they're swapping full-time.

One other thing: If the auto-assign is just setting up the first disk,
you could manually add another swap partition on the second disk.
When I've been in a similar situation, I've let the installer
auto-create the usual partitions on the first disk, and then added two
partitions on the second disk -- one for extra swap, and one
containing the rest of the drive space to be mounted as /home. Then
if space gets scarce on the first disk, I can always put things like
/usr/ports or /usr/obj under /home and link to them. 

-- 
Aaron
abaugher@esc.pike.il.us

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