REMOVE [EMAIL PROTECTED] FROM THIS NEWSGROUP IMMEDIATELY! -----Original Message----- From: Brent Kearney [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 10:14 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: (clug-talk) partitioning for Linux.
For production servers, separating the partitions can be useful. For example, you may want to mount /home with -nosuid options, or / as read-only. Its nice to have a separate /usr/local or /opt partition to NFS-export it to other boxes on the LAN for locally installed applications. Separate partitions is also very useful for in keeping file-system dumps to reasonable sizes, so they fit on backup tapes. On some machines, there are cylinder limits for bootable operating systems on the disk, so having / within about the first thousand cylinders is required. There are also concerns of open files on a filesystem during system crashes causing a file system corruption -- better to loose just /var than everything under a single /. There are other reasons to separate them too. But most and probably all of them don't really apply for one's home desktop box, unless you are actively optimizing filesystem block sizes on various partitions for performance tweaking (linux doesn't do this automatically, AFIAK). The cylinder limits issue is gone with modern PCs and linux, and the corruption issue is at best minimal risk given the reliability of modern journalling filesystems. If you devide up your disk space, you might find yourself doing symlink tricks to work around wasted space on your various partitions when you want to save another movie on disk and your /home is full. My 2cents. Cheers, Brent On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 07:43:33AM -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> /usr 20gb > > you must have a lot of executables. unless you load a lot of games you > > won't need more than 5Gb or at most 10Gb. > > I agree with Rob for the most part on his recommendations but I would > always suggest going generous on /usr. As someone who has needed to > increase partitions sizes a fair bit as support, I often find it's the > /usr or / directories that are too small. > > The / directory can be small as long as you use a separate partitions for > /tmp, /home, /var, /usr amd if you install commercial apps also /opt. > > I have often seen games or people with lots of apps use more space for > /usr than /home. (Of course there are exceptions if the person collects > lots of mpeg movies or mp3s as those files can eat space quickly). But how > much space does /usr need? > > Well I believe a full install of RedHat 9 requires about 2.1 Gigs. If you > plan on sticking just with that software a 3 gig partition should do. > > But a couple of things could start to eat space. > > 1) Games. I have seen /usr partitions in excess of 10Gigs. Mostly games. > Lots of Loki Games. Still I can see this going over 15 Gigs as not enough > Linux games exist. > > 2) People new to building their own rpms will do so as root and the source > and binaries will be put into /usr/src. Work on lots of stuff and I could > see you eating space. Preferably this should be setup to use the users > home directory via .rpmmacros. (see rpm online docs). > > You may want to create a separate /usr/local if you are compiling a lot of > your own apps. This will allow you to upgrade the OS, but leave the > /usr/local binaries intact (no guarrantee you won't need to recompile). > Now this concerns apps being installed from source. If you are building > RPMs, they should be reinstalled if you want them in your rpmdb. > > So I guess I agree with Rob. 5-10 Gigs for /usr maybe a separate /usr/local. > > BTW if you install alot of Loki games, they tend to install into > /usr/local so if you use a separate /usr/local, you may want to make this > upto 5-10 Gigs in size. Also most of the games probably can just be left > on there when you upgrade. No guarrantees but I suspect that you would be > able to run them from there after the upgrade without reinstalling. (I > could be wrong but I don't think so). > > --- Incoming mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.510 / Virus Database: 307 - Release Date: 8/14/2003 --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.510 / Virus Database: 307 - Release Date: 8/14/2003
