Best partitioning?

[Gerald Thompson]

On Tue, 2005-24-05 at 23:01 +0000, Truls Gulbrandsen wrote:
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> Hi there,
> I have just bought a 200GB hardisk that I intend to use as a web, mail
> and fileserver in my homenetwork.  I have been trying to figure out the
> best way to partition this HD but have not been able to find any good
> advice byu searching the net.
> 
> I will set up the machine with FC3 and later upgrade to FC4 when it is
> stable.  Or maybe I might as well use FC4t3 and do a final upgrade from
> there - any advice here please?
> 
> I would like to partition in such a way that it is easy to upgrade FC as
> new stable releases are available.
> 


Hi Truls;

Well I just finished experimenting with this so you caught me at a good
time.  I have read way too much about partitioning over the last two
years.

- First off - use LVM to partition the drive (except for /boot and /)
- LVM lets you change the partition scheme at a later date without
having to reinstall everything.

This is how I constructed my 2 drives 80 GB + 60 GB
/dev/hda1	250M 		/boot
/dev/hda2	2.0G		/
/dev/hdb1	2.0G		swap
- remainder of hda creates physical volume LVM
- remainder of hdb creates physical volume LVM
- together they combine to make LVM VolGroup00
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00		1.0G		/tmp
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01		5.0G		/var
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02		25.0G		/usr
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03		97G		/home


Now for you I would recommending increasing the size of /var to about 20
to 25 GB and probably set /home to whatever is left over.  You can also
leave some free space in the LVM Group, the benefit of leaving some free
space is that you can assign it to whatever partition needs some extra
space.

Now some people will say that you can put / into the LVM group too, I
tried this and I was unable to make my system bootable with / in the LVM
group.  This may change in FC4, but honestly if you
break /tmp, /var, /usr, and /home, and even /opt off from / you will
never need more than 2 GB for /.

As I said though the benefit of doing LVM is that you can change the
size of the LVM partitions without reinstalling the system, you just use
the LVM tools installed with Fedora and you can make adjustments as you
go.

I believe by default FC4 is going to be using LVM all the time, I might
be wrong about this.

I hope my recommendation helps you out.

Sincerely,
Gerald