Re: How I partitioned my harddrive
on Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 02:32:55AM -0500, Emma Jane Hogbin (emmajane@xtrinsic.com) wrote:
>
> I'd mostly call myself a "regular user" -- although I do have a web server
> installed on my laptop it doesn't broadcast to the world...it's just me
> the couch and the tv and occassionally the cat.
Hmm...I'd wondered where he'd gone....
<...>
> I believe I came up with these numbers from a Red Hat book, although
> many people have included their disk partition sizes on their web
> sites.
Myself included:
http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Linux/FAQs/partition.html
Note that partitioning is a pretty subjective issue. You can pretty
much have any number of partitions from one[1] on up.
Red Hat partitioning guidelines are almost certainly going to be biased
in favor of a large root partition. RH seems to want a 250 MiB root for
a 7.x install. You can do less, but it will complain. Debian uses a
sparser root, which the old farts consider a better thing (less to go
wrong). BSDers take this to an extreme.
The argument in favor of fewer partitions is fewer decisions, less
wasted/lost space, and easier overall management.
The argument in favor of more partitions is more control, particularly
selecting filesystems and/or mount options appropriate to the partition
(nodev, nosuid, noexec, etc.). You're also increasing recoverability --
filesystem corruption is generally restricted to only a single
partition. You also have the option of shuttling data to other
partitions while doing maintenance or recovery. And if you create a
spare bootable partition, you've got a fallback on the system in the
event your primary boot goes pear shaped.
> I know only of the linux laptop site, but many of the people
> who've contributed info have included disk partition information:
> http://www.linux-laptop.net/
>
> Here's mine:
> emmajane@debian:~$ df -h (-h = human readable sizes)
> Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda2 464M 28M 412M 7% /
Note that you're only using 7% of this partition. That's a good 350 MiB
wasted...
> /dev/hda3 4.6G 2.1G 2.4G 47% /home
Healthy. I generally give /home the remainder of space after allocating
to all else.
> /dev/hda5 2.3G 1.3G 901M 60% /usr
Good.
> /dev/hda6 464M 108M 333M 25% /var
I tend to recommend 750 MiB - 1 GiB. You've split out /var/cache
separately...
> /dev/hda7 2.8G 46M 2.6G 2% /usr/local
My experience is that /usr/local tends not to get used that much on
Debian. Something about having 12k available packages all of which go
to /usr....
> /dev/hda9 46M 13M 31M 30% /tmp
Good, possibly a bit thin. I tend to give 64-256MB to /tmp
> /dev/hda10 2.3G 334M 1.9G 15% /var/cache
Hmm. Frankly, I'd lose this. If you can, roll the space back into /var
and /home. parted may be able to resize your partitions.
<...>
> So today I filled up /var. Based on some great advice that got here I
> decided to find the largest subdirectory and make a new partition just
> for that directory. This freed up a good chunk of space (75% of the
> partition) to be shared in the other sub-directories. A number of
> people recommended cleaning out /var...464M isn't a lot to begin with.
> I have virtually no logs and no mail. As you can see, there wasn't a
> lot to clean out:
>
> debian:/home/emmajane# du --max-depth=1 -h /var
> 12K /var/lost+found
> 75M /var/lib
> 334M /var/cache
> 2.8M /var/backups
> 1.0K /var/local
> 1.0K /var/lock
> 21M /var/log
> 40K /var/run
> 9.9M /var/spool
> 10K /var/tmp
> 1.0K /var/opt
> 1.0K /var/mail
> 10K /var/www
> 441M /var
>
> (Note that the size of /var/cache is approximately the same size as
> /dev/hda10 from above? This is because I moved /var/cache into that
> partition but du reads it as if it were all the same...I think.)
du reads the directories _in_ the directory you point it at. If you
want to keep it on one filesystem, use the '-x' option.
<good stuff snipped>
IMO your end results are still a bit imbalanced. Not a huge deal, but
keep it in mind as you go through this process again.
Peace.
--------------------
Notes:
1. One partition assumes either no swap, or use of a swapfile.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
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