Recommended sizes for file systems

[Paul Howarth]

On Sat, 2004-11-20 at 09:41 +0000, Chris Jones wrote:
> Currently, I am running FC2 and until now have had no problem with 
> installing new kernels. However, with the latest FC2 kernel (2.6.9-1.3), 
> I have experienced the issue of the install running out of space on / 
> when installing. My file system sizes are as follows:-
>  df -m
> Filesystem           1M-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda1                  251       216        22  91% /
> none                       252         0       252   0% /dev/shm
> /dev/hda9               107114     72461     34654  68% /home
> /dev/hda5                  251        17       222   7% /tmp
> /dev/hda7                 4031      3579       247  94% /usr
> /dev/hda6                  510       263       222  55% /var
> /dev/hdb1                 4925      2889      1786  62% /var/lycoris
> /dev/hdb6                11379      1328     10052  12% /export/lycoris
> //gandalf/gandalf_c      40005     12771     27234  32% /export/gandalfc
> //gandalf/gandalf_d      37001      5242     31759  15% /export/gandalfd
> //gandalf/gandalf_e      37464     12896     24568  35% /export/gandalfe
> /dev/loop0                   8         1         8   1% 
> /tmp/initrd.mnt.J27039

How many kernels do you have installed? Could you remove an old one
prior to installing the new one?

> /dev/hda is a Seagate 120Gb drive partitioned as shown above, while 
> /dev/hdb is an old Quantum Fireball of 17Gb.
> 
> My question is what are the best partition sizes I should adopt, 
> particalarly as I am about to upgrade to FC3 - / and /usr are both too 
> small currently. Should I create symlinks into /home for some of the 
> directory's in the / and /usr areas? If so, which ones can safely be 
> symlinked? Or should I re-partition (after backing up everything I need)?

With a nice, big 120G drive like that there's little point in skimping
on the "system" partitions. I used to think that 2GB was enough
for /usr, then 5GB and now I'd use 10GB.

If I was doing a new install now I'd do:

100MB /boot, forced to be a primary partition on the first drive.

Everything else would be LVM logical volumes (make the rest of the disk
an LVM physical volume) so that sizes could be adjusted if necessary:

1GB /
10GB /usr
1GB /var
1GB /tmp (some apps insist on writing to /tmp; you'll get away with a
much smaller [e.g. 250M] partition in most cases)

Share the rest amongst the other partitions you need
(e.g. /home, /var/lycoris, swap space) and leave a few GB of the volume
unallocated so that you can grow a volume if needed.

You could add the smaller disk to the same volume group if you wanted,
effectively adding its size to that of the large disk, or, if you wanted
to keep it separate (perhaps its performance is significantly different,
or you might want to replace it sometime fairly soon), you could make it
a separate volume group and add only e.g. the lycoris data to that
volume.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>