Need advice about partitioning

[Paul Pianta]

On Fri, 2004-11-26 at 08:33 -0700, Robinson, Andrew W. wrote:

>      1. Can I "guide" Kickstart to lay out the disk the way I want? Or
>         would I need to run fdisk in the %pre section to gain that
>         much control?

see below

>      1. Do I need this much control? Does it really matter how the
>         partitions are laid out relative to each other if I expect to
>         shift space between them later with parted?

see below

>      1. Am I fixated on the wrong idea? Is there another way to think
>         about this disk layout altogether?

Hi Andrew,

I would recommend you go with LVM for setting up your disks.

It has been around for long enough now, and been used in many production
environments so I believe it has reached 'mature' status. It will give
you the flexibility that you are looking for and you won't need to use
parted later to mess around with growing/shrinking partitions. LVM
allows you to add/remove/grow/shrink partitions very easily and safely.

The only restriction that I am aware of is that you shouldn't setup
your /boot partition on LVM. But that is not really a problem - you
setup a 'primary' partition for /boot and then you can setup the rest of
the drive as a 'logical group' that would contain your 'logical volumes'
such as /, /var, /opt, /extra, etc.

If you ever need more space in your /var logical volume, then with the
LVM tools you can easily bump up the size if you remembered to leave
yourself some free space in the logical group. (like you originally
planned with the /extra partition)

Kickstarting LVM is probably easier done by using 'disk druid' during a
regular gui install and then snipping the config out of the anaconda-
ks.cfg file that is created in /root after the install is finished. Or
maybe the system-config-kickstart tool can easily configure LVM
partitions?

I hope that gives you some food for thought to munch on :)

pantz