[geeks] Solaris 10 install size

[Mike Meredith]

On Sat, 8 Jul 2006 12:27:02 -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> I did it the other day, but I forgot to write down the final space
> usage for /usr and /opt in particular.

Well you've implied that you're splitting / and /usr, which is the
conventional method, but I think Sun recommends not splitting the two.
But it's your call. 

I've got two systems running S10U2, one with a 4.6Gb /&/usr and the
other with a 4.5Gb /&/usr. Neither have got the "Everything" install,
but one is somewhat full at 93%. In your case I guess I'd go for a
8Gb /&/usr (or possibly 512Mb / and 7.5Gbyte /usr ... perhaps somewhat
big but it beats getting through the install program to find out that
you haven't got enough space. It also allows for upgrades later without
going through the tedious process of removing unnecessary flab before
you can upgrade (which is frankly one *big* problem with Solaris ...
pkgrm and friends just don't deal well with the kind of dependencies
you get when you install GNOME).

I wouldn't worry about /opt during the initial install. Just avoid
selecting the 'bonus' software at the screen where it mentions SunVTS.
Install it later after you've made /opt a ZFS filesystem. For the
record :-

rasputin# du -sh /opt/SUNW*
  34K   /opt/SUNWconn
 2.0M   /opt/SUNWits
  15K   /opt/SUNWmlib
 652K   /opt/SUNWrtvc
  54M   /opt/SUNWvts

I don't have /opt/sfw installed ("Solaris Software Companion"), but the
rest of my /opt is occupied by lots of strange packages (Firefox,
Eclipse, Maple, etc). Plus the Blastwave stuff which is the main reason
it is a separate filesystem.

You haven't mentioned /var, but it is worth making that somewhat fatter
than you would normally do as Solaris keeps lots of patch data there. My
workstation is somewhat excessive though :-

rasputin# df -h /var
Filesystem             size   used  avail capacity  Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c3t1d0s7      5.3G   1.0G   4.2G    20%    /var

I keep coming up with recommendations for /var which end up being
somewhat tight by the end of a system's lifetime. Making /var ZFS would
seem to be ideal, but you can't do it at install time (?) and I'm not
sure if there aren't any problems with doing that ... it's on my list of
things to check out.

> Ah, and somewhat releated: any favorite books for Solaris 10?

The updated Solaris Internals book which will be shipping on July 11th.
It's probably not what you want, but *I* will be curling up in a dark
corner and reading cover to cover when my copy arrives :)

I'm not aware of any introductions to Solaris 10 except for the
certification guides. I'm not sure you need bother ... as you're
familiar with Unix or older versions of Solaris it really isn't that
much different except the obvious ... SMF.