New Solaris Install Question...

[solarified]

I'm faced with installing Solaris 8 on a Sunfire V880. I need to perform a generic install and have questions:

The web-start (command line, no gui here!) is not able to do an auto-layout (for whatever reason). So, I'm not sure how to layout the file systems. The only software to be installed on the box is Oracle 8i, but the database is stored off-box and accessed via NFS. I'd like to utilize the drives in the best way possible (there are six 36GB drives).

Are there any good documents/guides on how to install Solaris from scratch and how to layout the file system?

Regards,

Tony

 

[blainepruitt]

I don't know of any documentation elsewhere, but I'm sure with some researching you could probably find some. For the sake of time here are some general rules dealing with Solaris partitions (slices).

Generally / is not going to change in size too much, and with a 36 GB hard drive you have plenty of room. Even with a disk that large I couldn't imaging making it any larger than 3 GB (3072 MB).

Since this machine has so much disk space, and is going to be a DB server you should probably make your swap two times the size of your physical memory.
Ex. 1 GB of physical memory, 2 GB of virtual (swap) memory.

I would need to know more info before suggesting how to layout the rest of the machine, and if the database is being housed elsewhere then it sounds like you are going to be a bit overkill on size.

Typically we layout and /opt directory, which usually takes anywhere from %25-33 percent of the hard drive, and a /usr directory which we make %40-45 of the hard drive. On a 36 GB disk /opt could probably be 8 GB and be PLENTY, and /usr around 10 GB. Also a /var slice would be good so that if logging fills up the file system it doesn't take / with it.

Depending on if you plan on doing software mirroring or RAID of the database would also effect how you might want to lay it out. I know this was long and drawn out, but I hope it helps.

--bp

 

[Igaduma]

Ah, finally someone with sane values for laying out drive slices!

I always felt like doing something terribly bad when I changed the standard solaris installation values for the slice sizes to some sane values.

var & usr are never big enough

I

 

[solarified]

Thanks guys. This helps alot.

-Tony