What is the consensus on the best partition scheme and size?/Keeping home separate

[Andy Green]

Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Oct 2006, Andy Green wrote:
> 
>> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>>
>>>   by the way, is there any reason *not* to encourage folks to use LVM
>>> rather than simple primary/extended/logical partitions?
>> If the LVM header area in front of the actual filesystem gets
>> damaged, it ain't pretty.
> 
> well, yes, there's that, but is the extra flexibility that comes with
> logical volumes worth the extra (albeit slight) risk?  i have folks
> ask me my opinion occasionally (yeah, that's frightening), and i
> typically suggest that it's worth it to use LVM.  but i'm always
> willing to listen to dissenting arguments.

I also advised folks to use LVM because of the flexibility, and in some 
cases (eg, we had some boxes with 12 SATA drive slots that were not 
initially fully popuplated but would be filled over time) I'd still say 
the same as you propose, especially as they were raided underneath in 
this case.

But on a box like this laptop, what does LVM being on by default really 
get you?  I don't use separate partitions for /home and such, for the 
single user laptop situation it's not beneficial.  So short of going 
nuts and taping a USB drive on top of the laptop and superglueing its 
lead in, for me at least LVM only enables the possibility of downsides 
while giving nothing good.

I did get an LVM header area damaged a few months ago on another machine 
(turned out the HDD was dying) that made it more difficult than it 
should have been to recover the filesystem behind it: after that I 
stopped being an automatic LVM fan.

On the original question what I normally do is have everything on a 
single /.  Usually what can fill up /home and /var is typically not done 
under root rights, and the default 5% reservation for root only on 
ext2/3 means you can then still ssh in as root to fix problems in most 
of the circumstances that you were trying to avoid with fixed sized 
separate partitions.  But none of the choices are inherently dumb and it 
depends on the exact usage scenario.

-Andy