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Re: Partition suggestions.



"Nuno Magalhães" <morceguinho@gmail.com> writes:

> Greetings.
>
> Yes, it's a religous question but i'll try to lmit it.
> This is my df -h
>
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda4              13G  8.6G  3.6G  71% /
> tmpfs                 991M     0  991M   0% /lib/init/rw

This is mounted VERRY early during boot so things have somewhere to
write too if they need to. There should be verry little data in there
if at all.

> udev                   10M   76K   10M   1% /dev
> tmpfs                 991M     0  991M   0% /dev/shm

This is for programs using shared memory but I don't usualy see it
getting used.

> /dev/sda10            373M   11M  343M   3% /tmp

I would really put tmp on tmpfs. It is faster than any disk if you
have enough free ram and uses swap if you don't. Given that you have
2GB ram there should be enough free usualy.

> /dev/sda7             4.6G  3.7G  731M  84% /usr
> /dev/sda8             2.8G  387M  2.3G  15% /var
> /dev/sda6             100G   78G   23G  78% /mnt/win64
>
> 1) What's with those two tmpfs? Are (both) really necessary? Isn't swap enough?
>
> /mnt/win64 is a FAT32 that will become ext3, it has most of my
> personal stuff. I want to leave most of the disk for my /home and
> 8.2GB of / are actually my /home already, meaning i have about 86GB of
> user files (the biggest chunk of it in a folder called "to_filter").
>
> This is a regular desktop and i'm gonna do a reinstallation. These
> partitions were done automatically 'cos i was already counting on a
> reinstall - there's a 20GB XP Pro partition that's gonna be reduced to
> 15GB if i don't decide to wipe it out completely (oh, wait, games...).
>
> Usually i use / and /home only. This is a 160GB Maxtor drive.
> 2) How about 20GB for / and everything else for /home?

How about 0.5-1GB for / and have /usr seperate?

> 3) is it worth it to separate /var and /usr on a desktop system? Why?
> Why not? What sizes?

/usr can be read-only while /var must be read-write. Also /var might
cause fragmentation on the FS and then files in /usr will fragment
when you update the system.

Also /usr can become damaged by writes to /var and crashes. If you
have /usr read-only it can't get corrupted.

> 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.

Keeping /var and /home seperate avoids all the usual causes that fill
up /. The other option would be quota support.

> Thanks in advance,
> Nuno

I always set my systems up like this:

/ 0.5-1GB (usualy on raid1) [includes /boot]
rest of the disk(s) lvm (usualy on raid5)
/tmp tmpfs

On LVM:
/var  1-2GB
/usr  5-10GB
/home plenty of space

One big advantage of lvm is that you can resize logical volumes at
runtime and most enlarging the FS online. So at first stay with the
lower bounds for the logical volumes and then enlarge them as needed.

For example I started with 1GB /var on my server and then enlarged it
to 2GB when I added squid.

MfG
        Goswin


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