Otto Moerbeek wrote: > On Wed, 22 Jun 2005, L. V. Lammert wrote: > >> At 02:04 PM 6/22/2005 -0500, Gabe Johanns wrote: >> > Hello, >> > >> > I have been running BSD on a desktop machine for 3 months and I would like >> > to install OpenBSD on my test server. My test box is a P500 with 128MB of >> > RAM and three disk drives. >> > >> > I would like to use 100% of the storage space on all three drives while >> > installing / on wd0, /swap on wd1, and all other partitions on wd2. >> > >> > I have not found a way to use the installer to partition my drives in this >> > manner using fdisk and disklabel. I have looked in the man files and in >> > online FAQ's (although I have found how to move and resize the partitions >> > on >> > an existing installation of the OS.) >> >> The installer is not setup that way, .. but why complicate life? Install / & >> /usr on your main drive (they don't need a lot of space, anyway), .. you can >> always move /home and/or /var to the other drives after installation. > > This is wrong info. It's perfectly possible to install with > various filesystems on different disks.
correct. Very straight forward, too. Configure your first disk (fdisk, disklabel) configure your second disk (fdisk, disklabel) configure your third disk (fdisk, disklabel) after adding each partition in disklabel, it will ask you what the mount point is. Answer. The only "tricky" part is after configuring the first disk, it will default to "done". No, just specify the second, then the third. > I'd have to check to know for sure, but I think having a swap > partition on the root disk is mandatory. But you can always add extra > swap partitions later. swap is no longer manditory at all. You can set up swap wherever you want. IF you want. Some things, like PF, only use kernel RAM anyway, and they don't swap, so putting swap on a dedicated firewall is questionable. HOWEVER, if I recall properly, you will have to manually put an entry in fstab for a non-boot drive-based swap. No biggie. May not even be an accurate memory. All that being said... 1) WHY do you feel the need to allocate all your storage space on three drives? If you don't have files to put in those partitions, and you aren't likely to ever have files to put in them, allocating the space will cause you many problems and solve none for you (i.e., longer fsck times after tripping over the power cord, possible memory exhaustion if you have really large drives to fsck on a small amount of RAM) 2) IF you are dedicating an entire drive to swap, I think you are in one of a few situations: a) You have WAY too little RAM in the system. 128M RAM and 20G of swap is not a good idea, at least if you really need 20G of RAM b) you are trying to use a very old disk, and you will discover that very old disks are much slower than new disks (i.e., you will get much better performance putting swap on a new, fast disk than on an old, slow disk) c) Expecting magical performance gains out of swapping to a separate drive. Hint: If you are wanting performance gains out when swapping, there is a much better, vastly superior way to get it. 3) If you have three IDE disks, you might be dissapointed by your attempting to implement the "ideal" of different file systems on different drives. What you wish to do is trivial. But examine carefully the WHY of doing it. A lot of "theoretically better" reasons for doing somethings don't stand up to close examination in real life. Three disks means at least three times the failure points. Nick.
