[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Partitioning



hi ya marco

On Sun, 2 Nov 2003, Ron Johnson wrote:

> On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 04:41, Marco Cecconi wrote:
> > Hello, I've been having this question on my mind for a bit now: what is 
> > the best practice to partition a hard drive under Unix, and in 
> > particular under Linux? At work I try to separate different 
> > functionalities as much as possible (eg. /boot, /, /var, /home all on 
> > different partitions). This makes sense since the machines are servers.
> > What is your experience regarding workstations? Is there any advantage 
> > or disadvantage in using a simpler partitioning (eg. only /boot and /)?
> 
> The whole subject is less critical now, but here's how I do it:
> Filesystem    1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda3       7874560    150520   7324024   3% /
> /dev/hda2         46668      2871     41388   7% /boot
> /dev/hda5       7874528   1770332   5704180  24% /usr
> /dev/hda6       7874528    708628   6765884  10% /var
> /dev/hda7       7874528    668568   6805944   9% /home
> /dev/hda8      86573816    862620  81313404   2% /data

it doesnt matter if its a server or workstation ...
	"partition scheme" should be independent of its function
	( yes, /var/spool/mail might be bigger on mail servers
	( yes, /var/www ( aka /home/http ) is bigger on web servers
	but the number of partitions is the same


/tmp should be its own partition because:
	you should ( require to ) do "chmod 1777 /tmp"


/boot is NOT needed ... 
	- /boot was needed in the old days to guarantee that the
	boot kernel was occupying the 1st 1024 cylinders

/ 	- should be as small as possible
	so that you can always do e2fsck on it and boot into single user

	- if you only have /  and "swap", than your entire 100GB or 200GB
	has to be e2fsck clean in order to get into single user mode 
	to fix whatever the problem was

<swap>	you want a swap partition so that if some silly apps uses
	up all your memory, the system can start doing disk swap
	and keep going ( really slow ) vs crashing/dying

/home  all user data goes shere and occupys the rest of the disks

	only /home and /etc is backed up .. rest of the partitons
	can be reformated and you shouldn't care  since its
	all backed up on the net someplace or on original cdroms

/usr/local	might be good to keep(symlink) at /home/local
	for more user installed modifications

lots of various reasons for doing lots of various partitions schemes

rest of the "partition howto"
	http://www.Linux-1U.net/Partition

c ya
alvin
 
> I could (and probably should) have combined / and /usr, but this
> way, /tmp has almost 8GB to play with.
> 
> The *most*critical* things, IMO, though, is to put /home and /data
> on their own partitions, so that if you do have to reinstall, you
> won't wipe out your data.
> 
> You know, I wonder if it wouldn't be useful to put /etc in it's own
> partition, too?  With Gnome 2.4 & CUPS, my /etc is 25MB, so a 50MB
> partition, like I did for /boot, would be all you'd need, I think.
> 



Reply to: