Re: [PLUG] partitioning question

[Bill Jonas <bill@billjonas.com>]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2001 at 11:40:45PM +0000, jbeck@jbwd.net wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a simple partitioning scheme for this drive, including 
> mountpoints?  I plan on using RH7.1, and it is making me manually partition 
> the drives, which I am new at, and don't know how to break it out 
> logically... 

Well, you'll probably get as many answers as people on the list.  :)

Try checking out the Partition-mini-HOWTO at
<http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition/index.html>.

It depends on the intended use for the machine as well as the
distribution, to a somewhat lesser extent.  My recommendation:  Give it
a couple hundred megs or so for / and split the rest of the space
between /var and /usr, keeping back some space for swap.  Probably favor
/var a bit over /usr.  My reasoning is that since it's going to be a web
server, you'll want a rather large /var partition, since the
DocumentRoot generally is at /var/www.

Here's my setup.  I have an old Sparc 10 with two disks in it totalling
around 4.5GB.  Here's how I decided to do it:

# sudo fdisk -l /dev/sd{a,b}

Disk /dev/sda (Sun disk label): 10 heads, 165 sectors, 5147 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1650 * 512 bytes

   Device Flag    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1             0      2573   2122725   83  Linux native
/dev/sda2  u       2573      5147   2123550   83  Linux native

Disk /dev/sdb (Sun disk label): 14 heads, 59 sectors, 1018 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 826 * 512 bytes

   Device Flag    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1             0       384    158592   83  Linux native
/dev/sdb2  u        384      1018    261842   82  Linux swap
# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1             150M   13M  129M   9% /
/dev/sda1             2.0G  905M  1.0G  47% /usr
/dev/sda2             2.0G  1.0G  906M  53% /var
# mount
/dev/sdb1 on / type ext2 (rw,errors=remount-ro,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/sda1 on /usr type ext2 (rw)
/dev/sda2 on /var type ext2 (rw)
# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        127192     123228       3964      39740      33984      59472
-/+ buffers/cache:      29772      97420
Swap:       261832          0     261832

I decided against having a separate /home partition, but I wanted more
space than 150M to share between / and /home, so I created
/usr/local/home and linked /home to that.

Of course, you might decide to use one big partition.  There's a pro/con
comparison of the benefits of multiple filesystems vs. a single
filesystem in the FreeBSD Handbook, at
<http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-steps.html>
(about a third of the way down the page; search for "Benefits of
multiple filesystems").  About the only advantage you have with a single
partition is a little added flexibility.  In addition to the benefits
listed at the above URL, having multiple partitions will permit you to
keep going, say, if somebody's DoSing you and the partition with your
logs fills up.

Hope that helps somewhat.

-- 
Bill Jonas    *    bill@billjonas.com    *    http://www.billjonas.com/

Developer/SysAdmin for hire!   See http://www.billjonas.com/resume.html

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