hOodville!

first things first, anybody needs some cheap (or better yet, free!) hardware for the server. nothing fancy is needed.

i started with a used 1.8Ghz cpu on an intel motherboard, an intel nic, and a 10GB hard drive. i accepted the default configuration for the freebsd partitions. the install chunked up my little 10GB hd for me.

here's how the 10GB hd looks: FreeBSD Disklabel Editor Disk:
ad0 Partition name: ad0s1 Free: 0 blocks (0MB) Part Mount Size Newfs Part Mount Size Newfs ---- ----- ---- ----- ---- ----- ---- -----
ad0s1a 256MB *
ad0s1b swap 997MB SWAP
ad0s1d 256MB *
ad0s1e 256MB *
ad0s1f 7966MB *

this is my fstab file, showing the partitions.
root /etc# cat fstab
# Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass
# /dev/ad0s1b none swap sw 0 0
/dev/ad0s1a / ufs rw 1 1
/dev/ad0s1e /tmp ufs rw 2 2
/dev/ad0s1f /usr ufs rw 2 2
/dev/ad0s1d /var ufs rw 2 2
/dev/acd0 /cdrom cd9660 ro,noauto 0 0

after i installed a photo gallery and had a few friends upload photos, i realized the 10GB hd was inadequate. i installed a 2nd 60GB hd and booted the server up. check /var/run/dmesg.boot, which shows both hds are recognized:
ad0: 9732MB [19773/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA66
acd0: CDRW at ata1-master PIO4
ad3: 57298MB [116416/16/63] at ata1-slave UDMA100
Mounting root from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a

next to partition and mount the 2nd hd and mount it to the /usr partition, which is where the website is housed. i made several mistakes partitioning and mounting the 2nd hd! and i learned a bunch. thanks to help from the people at bsdforums, i got it up and running like i wanted. here is the thread: http://www.freebsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?t=39238

here is how my disk space looks now:
root ~# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a 253678 35970 197414 15%
/ devfs 1 1 0 100% /dev /dev/ad0s1e 253678 112 233272 0% /tmp
/dev/ad0s1d 253678 69358 164026 30% /var
/dev/ad0s1f 7897310 1160514 6105012 16% /usrold
/dev/ad3s1d 34709196 1652466 30279996 5% /usr
/dev/ad3s1e 11053326 4 10169056 0% /mnt
/dev/ad3s1f 11053326 4 10169056 0% /mnt2

looks like i need to wrestle the /var partition into submission. it hasn't filled up with log files yet...one of the tasks on my list is to get 'log-rotate' working so i can easily purge old log files.