Recommendations for harddrives & partitions

[Peter Boy]

Am Mo, den 12.07.2004 schrieb John Alam um 16:33:
> I want to set up a server that will serve as a Gateway, Mailserver,
> Fileserver, Webserver, FTPserver, and Sambaserver.
>  
> I have a number of SCSI hard drives ranging from 2 GB to 22 GB, and an
> Adaptec 2940.  The box is an old Dual P200 Micron w/384MB RAM.

You may consider to use LVM. You can put all your drives into a logical
volume and treat it as one (not so) huge space (the only exception is
/boot). And it is quite easy to resize the space of the separate file
systems.

In your situation of limited file space you should avoid a fine grained
partitioning schema to avoid a situation where the overall file space is
sufficient, but the actual partition is not. You should put only those
directories onto a separate partition, which may grow unexpected and
very dynamically. The intention is to prevent a situation where one
service fills up all the available space and crashes the server instead
of crashing only a specific service. For your intended usage this may be
true for /var/log, /var/spool/mail, /home and maybe your samba
directory.

If you put all your space into a LVM, you have 28 gb. You can limit
/boot to 50 mb without any problem (the installation program will
complain, but can ignore it savely).  I would start with:

5  gb  /root
0,4 gb swap
1  gb  /var/spool/mail
1  gb  /var/log
6-8  gb  /home
6-8  gb  /srv/samba

Later you can resize the partitions according to the actual demand. You
have to use the command line utilities, because disk druid currently is
burried into anaconda and not available as a stand alone program,
unfortunately.


Peter