Suggestions for managing storage devices

How much time you spend overseeing the storage devices on your system depends on the number of users on your system and how they use system resources. A large user community and many resources require a lot of care and feeding. Here are a few suggestions for managing storage devices:

• If resources are depleted in either the /tmp or /var/tmp directory (but not both), have users distribute temporary files more evenly to both directories. (To do this, define the TMPDIR environment variable in the user's profile as TMPDIR=/tmp or TMPDIR=/var/tmp.)

• When assigning a device for mounting user filesystems (such as /home, /home2, /home3, and so on) on a multi-disk computer, assign it to a secondary drive to facilitate backups and restores. Distributing high-access filesystems on different disks can also enhance system performance.

• When copying large files, the value of ulimit may need to be changed to a number as large as or larger than the character count of the largest file (ulimit=number where number is larger than the character count of the file as determined with ls -l filename).