On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 12:21:48PM -0800, Jeremy Chadwick wrote: > On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 09:04:57PM +0100, Miroslav Lachman wrote: > > Jeremy Chadwick wrote: ... > > And why so big /tmp? I am running servers with smaller sizes for years > > without any problem. > > My recommendation above doesn't imply those who don't use it will have > problems -- each environment/system is different. > > That said, it's amazing how much software out there blindly uses /tmp. > Last year I ran into this situation: an older server (1GB /tmp) started > behaving oddly due to /tmp filling. A user of the system was using lynx > to download some large files (an ISO image and something else, I forget > what). lynx saves data its downloading to /tmp, and once it completes, > the user is prompted where to save the data (CWD being the default).
Another example: the stock /usr/bin/sort uses /tmp for its temporary storage when it needs to start using disk. You can redirect that via -T if you think ahead and realize that it's going to be a problem, but if you are just whipping up a quick shell script and later happen to run it on much bigger inputs than you were expecting you can run out of space on /. (Yes, that happened to me fairly recently on several systems, when some log files weren't being rotated on schedule.) An alternative solution is to symlink /tmp to /var/tmp, which I've done on many systems, assuming that nothing in the /etc/rc sequence will need /tmp before filesystems are mounted. (I suppose putting it on its own filesystem also assumes that.) In general, I think you've got a good idea and I plan to start adopting that in the future. -- Clifton -- Clifton Royston -- clift...@iandicomputing.com / clift...@lava.net President - I and I Computing * http://www.iandicomputing.com/ Custom programming, network design, systems and network consulting services _______________________________________________ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"