[lug] Linux Partition Sizes

[Riggs, Rob]

/boot should be larger than 8MB. You'll want to be able to store at least
two kernels, system maps and initrds for them, along with original boot
sectors, chain loaders, etc. On my SMP boxes I also tend to keep standard,
SMP & enterprise versions of kernels. I'm currently using 10MB of a 50MB
partition. (You've got 40GB for crying out loud! ;-)

/tmp should be on it's own partition. I usually make it .5GB (which is
rarely but occasionally used). Since all users must be able to write to
/tmp, a full /tmp won't result in problems.

/home budgets are the most variable, but you'd be amazed at how much people
tend to store in /home. You are probably underestimating the need.

/usr needn't be more than 4GB. I also usually grow a seperate /usr/share.

/var won't need more than 4GB for what you are doing with this.

Leave the rest of the drive unpartitioned. Really! You can then add
additional partitions as you need them. I've had to add /opt partitions
later on. /var/www or /var/spool/mail can be moved to their own partitions
if the need arises. Or you might decide that you need a 20GB partition for
something as important as /usr/share/mp3! ;-)

Right now you've got way more disk space than you know what to do with. Save
some until you do know what to do with it.

-Rob

-----Original Message-----
From: Dhruva B. Reddy [mailto:sledgehammer2010 at yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2002 4:43 PM
To: Boulder Linux Users Group
Subject: [lug] Linux Partition Sizes


I am building a box that will serve primarily as a light-duty web server.
I may, in the future, also want to use it as a mail server (for a handful
of users--no more than 20)

It's a PII-266 with 128MB of RAM and a brand spankin' new 40GB HDD.

Having never set up a server before (as opposed to a workstation), I'm
not sure how much space to devote to each partition.

Here are my thoughts:

/boot:	This only needs to be 8MB.
/:	Should be fairly large.
/var
/usr:	I guess this and /var should have the lion's share.
/home:	1GB at the *very* most, since there won't really be any users
	logging on for anything other than deploying stuff.

I would do a search on the web, but I'm at a loss as to what to look
for.  It may sound anal to worry about partitions in this situation, but
I would like to know this stuff for future reference.

Thanks,
Dhruva
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