[ale] Well, this is More Fun than I thought

[Charles Shapiro]

Once bitten, twice shy I thinks.  When I was running very short in my tiny
/ space, I also started having troubles putting GB-size files in /tmp.

-- CHS


On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 8:40 AM Jerald Sheets via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> That’s what I was going to ask.  That much space for /tmp is a little
> unheard of unless you’re transcoding large video files, etc.
>
> Jerald Sheets
> Sent from my iPhone
> questy at gmail.com
>
> > On Jul 25, 2020, at 4:18 AM, Steve Litt via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, 24 Jul 2020 20:37:11 -0400
> > Charles Shapiro via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
> >
> >> Finally decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my main desktop from
> >> Debian 8 to Debian 10. It had been a shameful two years since my last
> >> full upgrade.  Followed the Path of Least Resistance.  The original
> >> machine had a 1/2 TB drive partitioned into 8 gb of OS space, 18 gb
> >> of Swap, and the rest /home.  I was seriously running out of root and
> >> tmp space.  I've only filled up about 150 GB of my /home partition.
> >> I've got 12 GB of memory in this thing and I don't come close to
> >> using that up.
> >>
> >> So I hopped down to my friendly neighborhood Micro Center and picked
> >> up a 120 gb SSD for a laughable $18.
> >
> > Nice!
> >
> >> The hardest part of the hardware
> >> installation was squinching the data cable into the connector on the
> >> side of the motherboard.  BIOS recognized it right away.  A far cry
> >> from the Bad Old Days of fiddling with jumpers and entering
> >> cylinders/heads/sectors.
> >>
> >> I partitioned half the SSD as OS and half as /tmp.
> >
> > You might want to reconsider that /tmp. /tmp gets written/erased all
> > the time, and that's bad for SSDs. On the other hand, my /tmp contains
> > only 48 MEGAbytes of data, so from a practical standpoint that's
> > probably not an issue if your /tmp is like mine. I mean, if the SSD
> > breaks in 3 years, you buy another one for $18, and that one will
> > probably be 512GB.
> >
> >> lvm made it a
> >> Snap to use my old swap and mount my old /home partition.
> >
> > I'm not a fan of LVM because it's one more level of abstraction, and
> > it's one more level to drill through if something goes wrong. That's my
> > personal thing: I know a lot of people love LVM, especially those who
> > do encryption. But if you *didn't* want to LVM, you could also put a
> > mount to your current spinning rust /home in /etc/fstab.
> >
> > I bet your computer is now *a lot* faster. Every program you load now
> > comes straight from electronics, not from a head moving to the right
> > place on a cylinder.
> >
> > The way I set my (5 year old, 16GB RAM) desktop up, I have a 256GB SSD
> > as my root partition, and mount my spinning rust hosted data partitions
> > like /home, /scratch, /d, /s, and /classic. All of those but /home are
> > Steve Litt creations, and all of them get written a lot except
> > /classic. So, like you, my OS is on SSD, but for my big data I get the
> > cheaper cost per GB of spinning rust for my big data.
> >
> > Check out the following line from my /etc/fstab:
> >
> > /scratch/gnome-boxes /home/slitt/.local/share/gnome-boxes none bind 0 0
> >
> > I did the preceding because the gnome-boxes utility, which performs a
> > similar task as qemu and Virtualbox, defaults to putting huge disk
> > images in /home/slitt/.local/share/gnome-boxes, quickly overconsuming
> > the partition I use for /home. Meanwhile, I had no disk space left to
> > make a new partition and no desire to shrink an existing partition, and
> > also, I have no idea of my gnome-boxes needs for the future. No
> > problem: I used a bind-mount to my humongous 2.9TB /scratch partition,
> > which is normally used for big and/or miscellaneous stuff not needing
> > to be backed up. So my newly bind-mounted
> > /home/slitt/.local/share/gnome-boxes can now grow and shrink as needed,
> > without my having to tell it to (like with LVM).
> >
> > Another nice thing about using a small SSD as / is that you don't have
> > to use UEFI: You can use old-style MBR BIOS, without losing disk space,
> > if you want to use MBR and if your mobo supports it. That's what I do.
> > I've heard a few too many stories of badly programmed mobo UEFI
> > firmware bricking the box if you alter or delete the wrong files within
> > your disk's UEFI partition.
> >
> > SteveT
> >
> > Steve Litt
> > May 2020 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques
> >     of the Successful Technologist
> > http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques
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