Best partitioning?

Deron Meranda deron.meranda at gmail.com
Wed May 25 03:17:33 UTC 2005


On 5/24/05, Johnathan Bailes <johnathan.bailes at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I would like to partition in such a way that it is easy to upgrade FC as
> > new stable releases are available.
> 
> Ok, first this is my opinion.  There are many theories and practices
> for setting up *Nix style partitioning.
> 
> /boot = (whatever default size RH/Fedora wants) 102MB or so
> /home = (this is a server does not need a large home dir structure) 5GB at most
> /var = (this is where logs go so give it room to be big)  10-20GB
> / = (you are talking about a loooot of services so ....) everthing else.

Those a generally fine, except:

1. Throw in a swap partition too.  The good old rule of thumb is
   twice the memory you have (or will expect to upgrade to).  But with
   a 200GB HD, I'd just go ahead and make a 4GB swap.

2. Depending on what you do, you may want to put all the extra
  space in /home rather than /.  For instance if you will create a lot
  of data files (music, etc); make a 10-15GB / and everything else in /home.
  You may however decide just to have on big / and no separate /home
  partition at all (only do that for single-user systems).

The other really BIG thing that you'll want to do to insure that you
can continue to upgrade easily is to put almost everything under LVM
(logical volume manager).  Only the /boot partition should be a real
partition (/dev/hda0).  Then allocate the rest of the drive as one big
~200GB LVM partition.  All the other filesystems/swap are then put
inside the LVM (called "logical volumes" rather than "partitions").

The FC3 installer is a little more ugly for LVM partitions than raw
ones, but you can figure it out easily enough.  LVM is definitely
worth it long term.
-- 
Deron Meranda




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