Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 10:24:11AM +0800, Bob wrote:Interestingly I've been thinking about this recently as I migrate my home servers, firewalls, etc.. to Etch. It occurred to me that since one of the main reasons we partition harddrives on a server is so that a problem causing one partition to fill, won't necessarily cause the whole system crash, given this, what would be really cool would be to partition the system at install time using a slightly mean, but granular, best guess layout [0] so things should fit in their partitions without too much wasted space, then configure each partition as one mount point on one logical volume consisting of one physical volume [1] and then partition up the rest of the drive in 1GB chunks that sit in a pool of unused logical volumes so they can be assigned to any mount point when needed, preferably automatically.sounds like a lot of work to end up with essentially the same problem, which is your mass storage filling up. If you have 100 gigs floating around and you chop it up into little chunks and assign them to parts of the tree as needed, you'll eventually fill up 100 chunks and be in the same boat. Except you'll lose a larger %age to overhead from maintaining all those little bits. Much better, imo, to carve up one reasonably sized chunk for the system /, /usr, /etc, etc and then a couple really big chunks for those areas that might need it, /var/wwwfor web, /var/mail, /home or whatever.The point is that you end up with roughly the same amount of space, but don't have to mess with a whole pile of partitions. Further, because of lvm, if things are out of balance (like my mail partition, currently at 4 gigs is way way too big. if I had need I could recapture some) you can adjust them using e2fsresize and lvresizeetc.
Yes, ultimately you can't make more space, at least not that way, but you can make better use of the space you have, you'd have the Auto Chunk Add LVM System (ACALVMS) setup to keep your mount points on LVs that are ~%70 utilized, whereas due to bad decisions or leaving room for future planes, some of my partitions are only %20 full. On many servers the system drives and the data drives are separate [0] so the system drives are fairly empty, with this all of your system data would be at the front of the drive, [2] which might even be faster as the heads don't have to move so far. But that's not the point, it's just very flexible as you don't have to know what size a partition might grow to at install time, you don't have the problems you get with sticking it all in one partition where some growing log can fill the space needed for some other program, and for the most part you don't have to muck about with resizing and moving, partitions and file systems on a live system.
It would just make life easer for beginner server builders, they wouldn't have to wring there hands about how much space to allocate to this or that and could just do it. If you're worried about how much space you'd loose to overhead, it probably means your harddrive is too small, ;-) also you could loose less by making it less granular and having 5GB chunks, which would still achieve the same result more or less, you could even have a bunch of chunks on a second, spun down harddrive that would only power up when needed.
[0] I'm probably not advocating it on systems where this isn't the case, but for instance my home file server has become my apt-proxy, it's got one 32GB IDE system drive [1] and a 1TB RAID5 array for storing my files, and because I don't want my 10GB apt-cache cluttering up my RAID array, I just left it on the system drive, which frankly isn't doing much else, but when it ran out of space on /var I shrunk some virtually unused partitions like /home and created a big /var/cache, but all that would have been automatic with ACALVMS [1] actually it's an 80GB single platter Hitachi but I jumper all my system drives down to 32GB so I can dd from one to the other without concern for capacity, and since 32GB is more than enough for pretty much any OS, even 3 or 4 of them, it's never been a problem, though I haven't tried the latest bloatware from the evil empire, which probably can't install on less than a gig [2] so your /tmp, or swap or whatever partition doesn't start on the 90th GB it starts on the 12th,
-- Garrr, do your bit for global warming, become a pirate, you can "borrow" my copy of Windows 95 if you want.