BSD Partitioning

Based on recommendations here is how I'm going to partition the two FreeBSD servers that I'm installing in my lab.

mail, print, web, and file server
Part Size
/ 200M
/usr 15G - Ports live in usr
/tmp 256M
(swap) 2G - paging file
/var 10G - print spool, db files, other log files??
/var/mail 10G - for all mail files and easy backup
/www 5G - Web server - I'm going to have a lot of content
/home 50G - for all user files
*The rest of the space I'll leave unused in case I need to grow a partition

Firewall/Router
Part Size
/ 200M
/tmp 256M
/usr 7G
swap 512M
/var 2G

(ln) - Symbolic / Soft Links and Physical / Hard Links

The ln command can create symbolic and physical links.
A physical or hard link is a pointer to data on the disk. In this respect, there can be multiple pointers to the same data. The link is the file name and the inode (term commonly used) is the location of the data.

freebsd01#ln basic.file hardlink.file

In the example above, any data added to hardlink.file or basic.file is written to the same inode location (data on the disk). if basic.file is delete, hardlink.file will still exist because only the link is deleted. Hardlinks share permissions. They cannot refer to directories.

A symbolic or soft link creates a file that has an underlying path to the original file. It is essentially a reference that can cross file systems and point to directories.

freebsd01#ln -s basic.file softlink.file

Any opens, reads, and writes to softlink.file are passed to basic.file. Similarly, if basic.file is deleted, softlink.file will not work.

Finally, use the command ln -l to see what name a file is linked to.

Here are some very good explanations of hard links and soft links:
Wikipedia - Hard Link
Wikipedia - Symlink
Linux Gazette

The History of Unix

On Wikipedia I came across a digram that details the history of Unix and *nix operations systems (like Solaris and FreeBSD). I like the fact that they show Linux as a standalone operating system and not a dirivitive of Unix.

BSD Conference

I just found out that the BSD community is having a conference in Canada. Below is a banner from their website.