Re: Partition suggestions.

["Douglas A. Tutty" <dtutty@porchlight.ca>]

On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 08:15:35PM +0000, Nuno Magalh??es wrote:
 Usually i use / and /home only. This is a 160GB Maxtor drive.
> 2) How about 20GB for / and everything else for /home?
> 3) is it worth it to separate /var and /usr on a desktop system? Why?
> Why not? What sizes?
> 4) What's standard on keeping important parts of the filesystem from
> being full and halting the system? Once i did have / full and it was
> crazy to fix it 'cos it wouldn't boot.

If you don't want to run the risk of getting a full /, then you know
that things which can unexpectedly (i.e while you're not looking) fill
up your /.

Logs go in /var/log, so at least /var (a desktop shouldn't generate
enough logs that you need a separate /var/log) should be separate.

A filesystem is more likely to get messed up during, e.g. a power
failure if it is being accessed, i.e. is busy.  Keeping / separate from
/usr, /var/, and /home goes a long way to doing this.

Also, having just / separate makes it easy to have a duplicat /
somewhere that can be booted in an emergency.  Especally useful if the
box has more than one disk, an rsync script can keep a rolling copy
going.

My root partition is 291 MB, with a separate 61 MB /boot and I have two
kernels installed (current and old), with total of 130 MB free between
them.

Here's my df -h:


Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/mirror-root
                      291M  179M   98M  65% /
tmpfs                 502M     0  502M   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                   10M   72K   10M   1% /dev
tmpfs                 502M   16K  502M   1% /dev/shm
/dev/md0               61M   28M   30M  49% /boot
/dev/mapper/cat-home  9.9G  2.1G  7.3G  23% /home
/dev/mapper/mirror-srv
                      2.0G  504M  1.4G  27% /srv
/dev/mapper/mirror-usr
                      4.0G  1.9G  2.0G  49% /usr
/dev/mapper/mirror-var
                      4.0G  2.2G  1.7G  57% /var
/dev/mapper/cat-vartmp
                      9.9G  477M  8.9G   5% /var/tmp
tmpfs                 2.0G   84K  2.0G   1% /tmp


I don't know the details of the /lib/init/rw and /dev/shm.  I assume
that they are required.  They don't take up memory space until they are
used so I don't worry about them.  I have encrypted swap and put /tmp on
tmpfs so its encrypted too.  I then use libpam-tmpfile so each user has
their own private temp directory (encrypted).

I hope this helps.

Doug.