Recommended partitioning scheme

[Scot L. Harris]

On Sun, 2004-08-01 at 07:12, David L Norris wrote:
> > >
> > Much of this depends on what you plan to use the system for.  For a true
> > multi-user server using different mount points for various directories
> > is a good idea as it can prevent the server from dying if one of the
> > less critical partitions are filled up for some reason.  (usually a user
> > that generates tones of files for some reason causing / to fill up and
> > halt the system.)  
> 
> Users can't completely fill a filesystem; only root can fill a
> filesystem.  A portion (by default 10%) of each partition is reserved
> for the system.  Users may be able to cause some services to complain
> but the system itself should remain fairly operational.
> 

Very true.  It is funny seeing a file system at 105% of full. :)

But things like sendmail and apache can grind to a halt since they
should be run as non root users.  Much of this depends on what the
system is being designed for, as stated previously.


> > For a single user system IMHO this is not as important.  You can always
> > backup the /home directory if you are doing an upgrade or re-install. 
> > So for a workstation I normally setup a /boot, swap, and / file systems
> > with the bulk of the space in the / file system.  
> 
> I always keep /home on its own disk(s).  This way it is completely
> independent of the operating system itself.
> 

Good idea if you have the drives.

> > For a personal workstation put everything under /.  It will save you
> > lots of headaches when you find that you guessed wrong and need a much
> > larger /usr file system since you installed so many packages.  
> 
> Yep.
> 


> > How much memory do you have on your system?  Normally they recommend
> > swap be twice what your memory is.  I usually consider 1GB for swap the
> > most you should ever really need regardless of how much memory you
> > have.  If you find you are using a lot of swap space then you probably
> > need more memory
> 
> Depends on what you're doing.  Swap isn't all bad.  Running out of
> physical RAM is very bad and some uses of swap can prevent that.  More
> RAM is better but increasing the swap can be quite adequate for some
> things.
> 
> For example, VMWare can benefit greatly by setting its temp directory
> to /dev/shm, increasing the size of /dev/shm to 1 GB or more and adding
> enough swap space to compensate.  It seems to prevent many unexplained
> guest OS lockups and other problems.
>  < http://www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=844 >
> 

Good points.  I have not had any reason to run VMWare. :)  (that always
seemed to be a novelty, not a serious solution for anything.)  

> > Not sure having /usr as a separate file system will really save you
> > anything during a reinstall.  If I was reinstalling /usr is probably one
> > of the file systems I would want to replace completely.  Again if it was
> > a multiuser system a separate /usr makes some sense. 
> 
> I don't think mounting /usr separately makes any sense on a standalone
> system nor any RPM-based system.  It might have made more sense in the
> past on some systems, I guess.  I've tried running standalone systems
> this way and it typically does nothing but waste disk space.
> 
> > Excellent question!  I can not think of any reason you should not be
> > able to use the same swap space for two different install of linux as
> > long as they both are not trying to use it at the same time.
> 
> Sharing swap will work fine.  And, the installer should automatically
> detect and setup all the available swap partitions.
-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

If you're not very clever you should be conciliatory.
		-- Benjamin Disraeli