[geeks] Choice of filesystem for /var

[Francois Dion]

On 10/19/06, Miichael Vergalen <mvergall at telenet.be> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> for the /var filesystem wich I' going to move to a bigger set of disks
> what do you recommend to use as filesystem ? I was thinking of placing
> /var on either a zfs filesystem

Since you mention zfs and zfs on FUSE/linux is experimental, I will
assume Solaris 10 U2.
Since you were also thinking mirroring, i'm assuming you have two
drives doing nothing. You are also concerned about performance.
Mirrors would be a hit, but zfs would be a plus, if you have a little
bit of cpu to spare.   I'm assuming /var/log is the issue for space.

As an example:

zpool create pool mirror dev1 dev2
zfs create pool/log
zfs set compression=on pool/log
zfs set reservation=1G pool/log
zfs set quota=10G pool/log
zfs set mountpoint /var/log pool/log

I wouldn't mount /var as a whole unless you create a legacy fs. And
that's a bit complicated. I've done this to boot Solaris from ZFS
(single disk, mirrored, raidz or raidz2 bootable even, i've tried them
all) but that is x86/x64 only and is pretty involved. This will be
standard in Solaris 10 U4 else you need U3 beta or Solaris Express to
pull this off.

Francois