Re: disk partition schemes
"Kevin J. Menard, Jr." <kmenard@WPI.EDU> writes:
> Hey guys (and gals),
>
> I'm redoing a machine of mine. Was a Mandrake system, but now it's going to
> be a debian one ;)
>
> Basically, I have 20 gigs of space to tinker with (well, there's really 40
> there, but I run a hardware RAID 10). I also have half a gig of SDRAM (sure
> this would matter with swap space). Now, I have no problem running fdisk or
> anything, but I wanted to get a feel for what people are doing for various
> types of systems.
>
> This system would be used mostly for web-hosting, so I was figuring a large
> /home partition. Likewise only one or two kernels max, so I figured a
> small /boot. And finally, and this is really where I'm looking for help, it
> will be used as an IMAP/SMTP machine. So, should I create a separate /var
> partition? I'm hesitant because I don't want to a) not create a large
> enough partition, or b) create too large of one and waste space. Do the
> performance gains outweigh this? (I'm not terribly worried about the
> redundancy with the RAID 10 and all).
>
> I'd really be interested in what you guys think. TIA.
My suggestion would be:
/boot : Sector sizes and such already discussed, you will
discover that you need a separate boot, and then it
will be to late. You are not talking about wasing space
here either, it can be really small, but you will need
it for example when you start trying out alternative
filesystems (like reiserfs or whatever) or software
raid or other stuff...
/var: Really necessary. Log files, .debs,. If this is on root
filesystem chances are your machine will crasch, and
not boot up.
/var/spool: Neat idea. I usually don't have one, but since your
are going to do isp stuff... You'll have a lot of
angry customers if you lose their email...
/tmp Same reasons as with /var. If you are using the 2.4
kernel you could use the shmemfs (or whatever it is
called, same as tmpfs on SunOS.) if you allocate
enough of swap. A lot faster.
swap Yes, a lot of this...
/ & /usr Yes, also necessary. Reason behind this. Your
machine is going to crasch. You will need as much of
operating system as possible to salvage rest of
system with. /var /home and other partitions with
lots of writes to are going to be in a mess, and you
are going to have one crash were you are not able to
fsck these partitions, but must restore data from
backups. Debian project working towards system
containing enough tools on '/' to do this, but don't
know if it is ready yet. Anyway, the smaller the
root fs is the better. (fsck times and reduce chance of
corruption)
/home In above mentioned crasch, if you are able to
salvage home accounts, but not email, you are in
trouble. If you are not able to salvage home
accounts at all, you are out of business. Allocate a
separate one and backup it regurarly...
Generall idea in other words, get as much stuff of the root
partition as possible, and use separate partitions for stuff
that gets written to a lot, and that might fill up. (Yes, your
logfiles will overflow the system. Make sure they don't stop
stuff from being written to other places, like /tmp, when they
do, or you will not be able to login and clean it up...)
Regards
--
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Torbjörn Pettersson # Email tobbe@strul.nu
Vattugatan 5 # Web www.strul.nu/~tobbe
S-111 52 Stockholm, Sweden #
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