Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!dpz
From: dpz@athos.rutgers.edu (David P. Zimmerman)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Squueeezing Disk Space
Keywords: What's Expendable?
Message-ID: <562@athos.rutgers.edu>
Date: 12 Jan 88 14:44:45 GMT
References: <2509@dasys1.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 51

In article <2509@dasys1.UUCP> ejablow@dasys1.UUCP (Eric Robert Jablow) writes:

> Now, I had installed all the optional software Sun produces except
> for the Versatec stuff, the Transcript software for our Apple
> LaserWriter (the shredder), and Macsyma.  Thus, as more people use
> the system, the closer we approach a disk space crisis.  What should
> I get rid of?  The System V compatibility libraries?  Which things
> should I jettison?

As Doug said, you can chuck the SysV stuff if you really don't need it
right now.  You can get rid of /usr/demo, and /usr/src if you don't
care about the suntool/* sources.  If you are willing to risk mutiny,
you can poof /usr/games (buy an Amiga for the diehard gamers).  I find
that we don't even bother "stat"ing /usr/sccs :-), much less use it,
so you can save a bit of space there.  You can probably turn off
accounting if no higher-ups care about the stats, and write some
scripts to clean up the rest of /usr/adm very frequently.  /usr/diag
is, well, up to you.  Suffice it to say that it eats ~2M.  It all
comes down to what you are willing to do without.  I personally would
get rid of /usr/dict, but then again, I think a PC is a wonderful
terminal with Kermit running on top of Turbo Lightning.

What we often do around here when partitions fill up is move things
off of /usr onto a user file partition, and put in a symbolic link
from the expected place.  I don't think you would be able to do this,
given that your saturation is global rather than on just one
filesystem, but maybe you can adapt this somehow.

You can also chmod /usr/man/cat* to be not writable, so that the cat*
formatted man pages don't eat up more and more disk space.  This will,
of course, require them to be rebuilt every time someone wants a man
page, but maybe someone will get aggravated enough to buy you another
disk :-).  Certainly this is your classic space/time tradeoff.

Speaking of that, you want to go through your locally installed stuff
and see what can be shot that will only require extra time to build
when actually needed.  GNU Emacs *.elc files are good candidates.
Space is limited, but time is infinite (well, at least it is when I'm
in a boring class).

Also!  Look carefully at how you set up the client partitions.  Make a
directory /pub/etc, move a lot of the client /etc programs there, and
make links to them.  We save MeGaByTeS of space that way, and can get
away with ~2M client roots.  You can also nuke /private and do some
other stuff along that line, but that is more involved than just
killing a directory.  If you need to, skimp a bit on the swap space
for everything (see my point of annoying a money-payer above).

						dpz
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