*BSD News Article 60989


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From: rsww@quanta.com (Ross Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Help News Server out of Inodes :(
Date: 31 Jan 1996 16:36:48 GMT
Organization: Quanta Communications, Inc.
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Distribution: inet
Message-ID: <4eo5r0$jss@news.quanta.com>
References: <4em5f2$6vo@nntp.interaccess.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: quanta.quanta.com
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Tombstone (stone@flowbee.interaccess.com) wrote:
:      My news server is staring me in the face right now telling me "yup" 
: I'm at 72% storage capacity and 90% inode capacity, "well you better do 
: something". 

: 	I better. Being a first time new server runner and BSD operator 
: (although I use Linux extensivly) I am not positive what I can do.

: 	I suppose I can't change my nomber of inodes w/o reformatting the 
: drive right? If that's true does anyone know how to back up a news server?

: 	The other thing I'd like to know is how should I make the file 
: systems this time to avoid the problem? Block size, inodes, anything else 
: I should do now the I have this "opportunity" to reformat my disk.

: 	Oh, the last thing is there some way for me to see the parameters 
: of my drive right now? I would like to know the block size and some other 
: info.

: Thank You!!!

You can back it up like any other partition using tar or dump. Next
time when creating a filesystem for news use these parameters.

newfs -b 2048 -f 1024 -i 1024 -o space -m 5 <spool dev>

This creates 2048 byte blocks (about the average size of an USENET
article), 1024 fragment size (good frag size for 2K blocks), set
inodes to 1024 (2 inodes/block good for news spool due to file linkage),
sets optimization for space (news is slow anyway), set the min free to
5% (any less and it'll back up on you due to poor disk usage, trust me
I know!).

It is also good practice to spread a feed across multiple hard disks
and when setting up the binaries groups on their own hard disk to
up the bytes/frags/inodes and possibly the min free.

newfs -b 8192 -f 2048 -i 4096 -o space -m 8 <binaries spool dev>

Since the binaries files tend to be larger, this is probably the
default newfs options in freebsd, so newfs <binaries spool> should
yield the same results for the binaries feed drive.

Learning from experience is the best way to learn, but not the
easiest.


Cheers,

Ross Walker