Newbie: File system layout ans installation location

[sendres]

Okay, I'm sure this is more of a Solaris question than an XAMPP question, but I thought someone here might have the best advice nonetheless...

I want to set up a little server on my home network for web development projects; I don't plan to use it for anything else. Although I've used Solaris somewhat at school for programming projects, this is the first time I've tried setting up my own system. I'm also a newbie to XAMPP.

I acquired an old Sun SparcStation 5 with dual 2.1GB drives. I know that's not a ton of disk space by modern standards but I figured it's enough to play with. I formatted both drives and performed a clean install of Solaris 8. Along the way, I selected auto-layout for the file system, which I'm told is the thing for newbies to do. The installer came up with the following layout:

Code: Select all

   overlap       c0t1d0s2 2028 MB
   /export/home0 c0t1d0s7 2028 MB
   /             c0t3d0s0   45 MB
   /usr/openwin  c0t3d0s1  247 MB
   overlap       c0t3d0s2 2028 MB
   /var          c0t3d0s3   25 MB
   swap          c0t3d0s4  147 MB
   /opt          c0t3d0s5   25 MB
   /usr          c0t3d0s6  377 MB
   /export/home  c0t3d0s7 1158 MB


Now, it's my understanding that XAMPP installs to /opt/xampp by default. In looking at this filesystem, I see that /opt is allocated 25MB, but the XAMPP download alone is 38MB.

Is this going to be a problem? Should I have tried to manually layout the file system? Should I install somewhere besides /opt? Other advice?

Thanks so much for any help...

Steven

[pawill79]

With such a small disk you may benefit from manually redoing your partition layout. So instead of using Auto-layout, go with Manual-layout.

Partition scheme you can use...

Partition 0 - / (the / indicates this will be the root partition, fill in size with
leftover space after doing the swap partition)
Partition 1 - swap 512MB


This is not ideal for production environments but is fine for testing.

[krelvinaz]

I wouldn't bother playing with Solaris 8... and go directly to Solaris 10 which you can download for free.

There are many advantages to 10 over 8 including zones etc...

For your hard drive, like pawill79 said, use a single root partion and make swap double your memory.

You don't need separate /opt /var etc... filesystems.

[sendres]

I would like to try Solaris 10, but in reading the system requiements, it seems my system does not have enough resources. I have 160MB physical memory and a 70 MHz processor; the system requirements call for 256 MB and 250 MHz processor.
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/specs.jsp

And it makes sense to me to just use swap and root, but given that I have TWO disks, how can I make the root span the free space on both disks?

I tried

Code: Select all

   /             c0t1d0s0 2028 MB
   overlap       c0t1d0s2 2028 MB
   /             c0t1d0s0 2028 MB
   swap          c0t3d0s4  512 MB

but I get an error the "moving / (root) to disk (c0t1d0) will automatically make it the boot disk". Which makes sense to me, since it's seeing root on c0t1d0 now.

I plan to add several "users" to the system, but each "user" will really be just a separate home directory for each project I'm working on. Most of my projects will be small, but one will likely use WordPress and another will use MySQL extensively. So I'd like to have most of my space available for web pages and MySQL databases.

Which leads me to other dumb newbie questions...
When one creates new users (useradd?), where are their home directories normally created? And are the user's MySQL files (since these will be the larger ones I work on) stored there by default?

I was thinking I'd make c0t1d0 completely for user files, and following your suggestion, use c0t3d0 for root and swap. I'd like to use even more space, if possible, but again, I don't know how to "span" the two drives.

Sorry if all this seems terribly rudimentary for you but I've never tried this before...
Steven

[sendres]

Okay, here's what I did. I used the following layout:

Code: Select all

   /home         c0t1d0s0 2028 MB
   overlap       c0t1d0s2 2028 MB
   /             c0t3d0s0 1516 MB
   overlap       c0t3d0s2 2028 MB
   swap          c0t3d0s4  512 MB

I created my user accounts in /home and gave each its own /htdocs directory. This way, I can have "online" files in /htdocs and "offline" files outside /htdocs for each project. Then I made symbolic liks from within /opt/xampp/htdocs to each of the project /htdocs folders.

Works like a champ!
Thanks for the help!

Steven