Bob wrote:
So I'd like to know if this box was yours, how would you partition the disks...? Are there any documents other than the ones referenced by the Debian Install Guide on how you should partition a Servers disks...?
This is a fairly common question and a search in the list archives should yield many answers from the past when this discussion has popped up. With that said...
In recent years my method of patitioning has gotten rather lax but resiliant. A few years back I got nailed by having too much space in some partitions and not enough in others so I started to stray away from trying to predict how much space was needed for given situations.
I tend to put /, /usr and /var on their own partitions of decent size (180Mb, 2.7Gb, 1.8Gb on my laptop) and then take the remainder and mount it under it's drive name in /mnt. So for my laptop /dev/hda7, a 15Gb partition, is mounted under /mnt/hda7.
From there I create directories which are symlinked into the rest of the system. Anything which might grow excessively will be given it's own directory somewhere in the /mnt/* system. So, in this case, /home is a symlink to /mnt/hda7/home. On my server /var/www is symlinked into /mnt/hda5/www since I host a rather large picture gallery. Often I'll make a single directory called misc and symlink that into the root as a catch all directory for anything that needs large space. A throwback to how we did things in a regional ISP I used to work at a decade ago.
By doing it this way I'm able to move pretty much anything around and can later expand the system by dropping in another drive or mounting to a remote filesystem via NFS (netapp, anyone?). Nothing of importance really has a permanant location. The segregation of /var, / and /usr is mainly for ease of recovery/upgrading and a nominal amount of protection against out-of-space situations than anything else.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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