[OpenIndiana-discuss] Moving /var and/or /usr to own zfs filesystem

[Christopher X. Candreva]

On Thu, 5 Sep 2013, Jim Klimov wrote:

> > here is the output of df:
> > 
> > chris at Jubal:~$ df -h
> > Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> > rpool/ROOT/openindiana
> >                        134G  2.1G  132G   2% /
> > rpool/ROOT/openindiana/var
> >                        132G  400M  132G   1% /var
> 
> okay, so this part seems to be a pretty standard split, probably helped
> by the setup wizard? I think it supports making separate /var datasets.

As far as I remember I split if off by hand myself, after installing. The 
thing is, it doesn't work on the new mahcine I'm trying that on.

However, you may have just convinced me NOT to. I have to admit, I'm 
essentially comming from Solaris 8 (I've run some 10 machines, but not used 
zfs extensives and haven't used Zones at all). However I think I finally 
understand what boot environments do, why the filesystems are 
consolidated, and what package management has to do with it.

> What sort of software do you have in /usr/local? If it is packaged
> (home-brewn, or from collections like SunFreeware), this should really
> be part of the root filesystem (fs-tree as of now) and ultimately it
> is individual for each BE managed by packaging and beadm.

/usr/local is historically anything I've compiled. Until now I've just done 
configure && make && make install ,  but plan to use IPS on these new 
machines, and I now see why having usr/local on the same filesystem may be a 
good idea.   ZFS changes so many assumptions. The good thing is, it also 
makes it easy to split things off later if it looks like a good idea.

Can zones be easily copied to other machines, like VM images ?

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Chris Candreva  -- chris at westnet.com -- (914) 948-3162
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