On Sunday 18 January 2004 19:56, Ben Munat wrote: > So, it appears that there are some varying opinions on partitioning... > anyone care to weigh in?
As a general note: A separate /boot is generally a good idea. Being unmounted most of the time means that it's quite unlikely that it'll ever get corrupted. Plus you can use the most robust filesystem (ext2/3) on it without losing any performance in regular use. (Not that there's that much to be gained with reiserfs or xfs) A separate /boot won't require more than 32 MB and even then it can house 10 kernel images easily. The note that a journal requires another 32 MB with standard settings (which is stated somewhere in the Gentoo Docs) is just bollocks. Separate /var and /tmp partitions are useful for security as you can mount either one with noexec. (There might be some programs, which require exec rights in /var) The problem, of course is that /var requires a lot of space every now and then. Luckily this is fairly easy to circumvent either by changing PORTAGE_TMPDIR or mounting something else in /var/tmp/portage. Space is a trickier question. /tmp shouldn't eat more than 100 or so MB. If it does, something's fishy. /var should cope with 1 GB for the majority of purposes, unless of course you're planning to store a big database, website or somesuch in it. A separate /home is quite useful. If you ever happen to change your distro, or need to do a completely fresh install (f.ex. due to your system being compromised) you won't need to jump through any extra hoops to preserve your personal files. Obviously in the case of a compromised system you'll need to audit them anyway, but still. Also, mounting /home as noexec is a fairly handy security/control measure as it prevents people from running malicious code from their /home directories. It is a fairly big restriction though. The space for /home would probably be everything that's left when other partitions have been taken care of. A separate /usr is mainly useful in that it can be mounted read-only, which increases security quite a bit. Then again, if you already have separate /tmp, /var and /home, you should be able to mount / as read-only without problems. Of course, if you mount /usr or / as read-only you have to reboot every time you install something or change a configuration file. For desktops this might be a bit unwieldy, but for servers it shouldn't be a huge problem. (Of course, it means that you'll have to take it down for every security update.) As for space. A fairly full featured Gentoo system eats up c. 3GB of space. (almost all of which is in /usr) On top of that one should add /usr/portage/distfiles which can easily get as high as 2 GB and /var/tmp/portage (if it's not separate) which can temporarily require as much as 3 GB. I'd say that the minimum for / in a desktop system is around 5 GB, and even then you should keep a close look on /usr/portage/distfiles and might need to change the PORTAGE_TMPDIR when you compile OpenOffice. Of course, with Gentoo being a somewhat gaming-oriented distro, the space requirements for / (and especially /opt) might shoot up in the near future. As for other partitions, I don't know. Many people seem to have a separate data/media partition. Personally I can't really see any reason for it, since you can just as easily create a /home/media directory in the /home partition, and you won't lose space when one partition gets full and the other's still half empty. The same reasoning would IMO apply to shared directories in a network environment. So, my recommendation for a desktop system, without any major reasons for tightened security would be: /boot 32MB / >5GB, but preferably around 10 GB /home whatever's left And for a server: /boot 32MB / 5GB should be enough, but obviously it depends /tmp 100MB /var 1GB + whatever space the services you run require /home lots if it's a /home server, packed in with / if it isn't So, comments? -- Jani-Matti H�tinen -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
