Re: partition recommendations
On Wed, Mar 15, 2000 at 02:22:37PM -0800, Kenneth Scharf wrote:
> With an eye toward upgrading to Potato, and hearing
> all the horor stories about slink->potato upgrade
> failures I decided to do a fresh install from scratch.
> So I obtained a brand new 27GB drive from
> www.compgeeks.com (check them out, great bargins!). I
> will have a small (say 100 mb) "/boot" partition at
more like 5 or 10MB for /boot, but i much prefer to simply have a
small / partition instead of making a separate /boot.
> the front of the disk (to avoid cyl 1024 problems with
> lilo), and a 128mb swap partition. Other than that
> any good ideas on how to partition the disk? In the
> past I have just made the rest of the drive one hugh
> partition for "\" to avoid figuring out how much to
> allocate for everything. However with 27GB of space I
> guess I can make a few errors without much horror.
oh my lord no, that may be easier but i think you will hate yourself
later for doing that, for one thing it will take FOREVER to fsck, and
if it ever encounters a unnice kernel (ahem 2.2.13) your entire system
is hosed, gone, along with all your data.
yes I am a partition freak, i have lots of partitions, but my recent
encounter with kernel 2.2.13 made me very grateful that i made so many
partitions, it saved me from losing all user data and only had to
reinstall the OS, which is relativly less effort then recovering user
data.
I reccommend:
64MB - 70MB / this easily fits below 1024 cylinders so you don't need
a clumsy /boot partition.
huge (i have 4GB) /usr
large /usr/local if you plan to compile stuff yourself, this way if
for some reason you want to rebuild your system from scratch (say do
to something nasty like kernel 2.2.13) you don't lose your self
compiled stuff/source etc.
800MB - 1GB+ /var, why so big? /var/cache/apt nuff said. (symlinking
stuff around is very ugly to me, and its not like you don't have the
space :P)
for improved security i always create a 30 - 60 MB /tmp and a 200-300MB
/var/tmp, this is just my weird preference, its probably just as good
to create a 100 or so MB /tmp and symlink /var/tmp to it. this
disallows any user writablility to the / filesystem, which cuts off
all kinds of DoS and other security attacks.
now pretty much all that is left is /home, after you pick your sizes
for the above, use the rest for a nice huge /home
now with the above setup /usr and /usr/local may be mounted readonly
full time, just teach apt how to make /usr writable during
upgrades/installs this also helps protect agianst some security issues
but is really more protective against things like kernel 2.2.13 ;-)
> I intend for this machine to be a workstation (machine
> is a PIII-500 with 128mb dram), and will be developing
> software/packages with an eye toward becoming a debian
> developer (whenever new ones are being accepted
> again). BTW I still have slink on the other disk
> (13gb "/" partition).
>
the above partitioning scheme should work well for developing.
--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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