Christopher Sawtell wrote:

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 18:11, Brendan Greer wrote:


Hi guys

In a couple of weeks I am going to reinstall mandrake and repartition my
hard drive and in the process remove any trace of windows.

my system
A dvdrom drive and a cd writer
2X 40 gig hard drives
Mandrake 10
512 mb ram

I was thinking of having a 2 gig swap partition


Not necessary to be that big.


How can you say that when you don't know what the computer is to be used for? Just one gotcha here is that some of the older distributions max out at a 2GB partition, as I found out when stress testing sendmail - RH9 wont take 4GB!



Now I was wanting to know peoples recomendations for partition sizes and
mount points for my system to make it easily upgradable and reliable?
And why?


I'd divide the hda disk into 3 partitions.
A small /boot partition ( 2 or 3 cylinders ~ 30 Megs )
A swap partition - 512 Megs will probably be more than enough.
The remainder for everything else.


Ah, so you've never found out what happens when an application fills it's partition, and you go and change your password, then (: Also, that would require logical volume support, which, while not impossible to understand, is difficult. And that's from someone with an HP-UX background, which is what this implementation is modelled on.

If using for desktop aplications, then I'd use a 2GB swap, and the rest for /. On servers, I normally use /, /usr, /var, /home, /tmp, /usr/local as separate mount points. In addition, I usually mount /share for samba, and /oracle for databases, etc all sized as necessary.

I'd use the other disk for the data disk.
Why? It's simple. The notion of lots of different partitions for the various file systems is a PITA, and now that disks are big it's longer necessary.


If you keep partitions functionally separate, then one thing doesn't screw up another.
In this case, unless you need a lot of storage ( mp3, images, video, etc ), I'd look at making them a software raid set, and mirror/stripe a 40GB diskset to partition up ( see my recent paranoid posts about hdd reliability ). If not, then I'd put 1GB of swap on each disk.




Also is there a way to have a dirrectory, sub dirrectorys and files that
all users can have access to?


Yes.
Make sure the group ownership of every file on this data area to be for users and read write. Check up on the meaning and use of the set group id and sticky bits on directories and set the umask for the users to be 0002.


http://www.geocities.com/tipsforlinux/articles/028.html
http://burks.brighton.ac.uk/burks/linux/rute/node14.htm

There are many other similar references. A Google search on 'linux stick bit will be informative.


Just don't mount it as /tmp!



This will be my first only linux only install, in the past I have always
had at least one Windows os installed.


Welcome.



Just my $0.02

Steve

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