Solaris 9 disk setup

[seanken]

Hi,

Recently I came into ownership of a solaris server with a pretty low spec. I am having trouble with the disk setup on it. There are 2 disks which I would like to 'rearrange' a bit.

Firstly, a df -k produces:
Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 2017894 1307659 649699 67% /
/proc 0 0 0 0% /proc
mnttab 0 0 0 0% /etc/mnttab
fd 0 0 0 0% /dev/fd
swap 683416 104 683312 1% /var/run
swap 683312 0 683312 0% /tmp
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s7 6134885 350130 5723407 6% /export/home

(sorry for the misalignment).

As you can see, the s0 disk is bearing the brunt of the files. I would like to have, say, the /var mountpoint on the second empty disk. Maybe create a few lvols(?) to split the disks up. How would I start with this? Could I make a copy of my /var, delete the /var then recreate on the 2nd disk, finally recopying the /varcopy back to /var? Or is this complete nonsense?

Any ideas/help much appreciated! In the meantime, I'm off to confuse myself even more with the solaris manual.

Thanks,
Sean

 

[xkjdhdg]

use the MV command and move the /var to the other disk and then on the pervious disk make
symbolic link to the /var on the other disk.

 

[seanken]

If I mv the /var to the 2nd disk, surely I would have to mv it to /export/home/var? Is this what you mean?

I would prefer to have a 'cleaner' setup, i.e. only one var directory @ /var rather than a link to /export/home/var. Is this possible or would a rebuild be in order?

 

[xkjdhdg]

If you want it clean then a rebuild would be in order. Do you want to reload Solaris and repartition? Which disk would you load Solaris on?

 

[bi]

I would suggest a reinstall and create separate mount points for /var, /usr, and /opt. Right now, those are in your / filesystem. /usr and /opt get filled up with system and application software. Don't put them in /export/home. That filesystem should be for user's files, not files that are important for the operating system.

 

[seanken]

I was messing around yesterday with the format commant and assigning new partitions for a java mountpoint that I wanted to create. This seems fine where you want to create a new mountpoint but I think that a reinstall is in order, as you say, for the /var, /usr....mountpoints.

Are /opt, /usr, /opt the only sys dirs that should have a seperate mp? what about /etc?

On our HP, the disks are seperated into lvols. I presume that this is more or less the same setup as striping? Also, can I alter the stripe sizes on the fly where the partition has data existing on it? I am presuming not.

I'm finding that this is quite a nerve wracking area to be learning on your own so thanks for the pointers

 

[bi]

No, you want /etc to be part of your root (/) filesystem. It has a lot of files you need if you boot into single-user mode. Plus, it has the mnttab and vfstab which tells the system what to mount.

Here are the filesystems I specified when I set up Solaris 9 on a sand box. These are the same filesystems I specified at Solaris 7 (I had a Sun employee helping me with that installation) and Solaris 8.

/
/usr
/var
/usr/local (this is definitely optional, but recommended if you have a lot a shareware)
/export/home
/opt
/tmp

/tmp used to be where Solaris put swap, but now it puts it in /var/run, and apparently in your case, also in /tmp.

Additional filesystems will be built automatically: /proc and /var/run.

 

[seanken]

Right. So the reason is purely for /etc being in / is for the single user mode then? That makes sense but I never really thought of it.

As the man says, it's better to be making these mistakes on a test server than coming across them o nthe real thing.

Thanks,
Sean

 

[bi]

I hadn't read the part about your HP experience.

Yes, the way Sun does filesystems is different from the way HP (or AIX) does theirs. Sun does have some pretty decent documentation about their filesystem management. Go to docs.sun.com and do a search on file system (note it's two words for Sun, not one word as it is for HP and AIX!).

Are you using Veritas or DiskSuite to set your logical volumes up?

By striping, do you mean the "slices" on the disks that Sun has?

 

[seanken]

Yes, by striping I mean partitioning using the format command. Our HP has veritas on it but, never having been involved in a server setup, I never realised it's significance until recently.

I'll have a run through of the sun doco on the matter.