[lug] Linux Partition Sizes

[Hugh Brown]

A full redhat 7.2 workstation install took up ~1600MB

Right now my /usr is at 2.5 gigs on my home workstation


I would make boot a bit bigger since you can't resize without
reformatting.  You aren't going to miss an extra 32MB and if you need it
you will be glad you have it.

I just had a devel machine that I was lax about letting developers have
root on and one of them was in / as root and did rm -rf *  This made me
want to make future machines partition in such a way as to have / be
mounted ro.  I believe this means that /tmp and /var need to be on rw
partitions.  Some people like to have /opt and /usr/local on separate
partitions too to ease upgradeability.

Since it will be a web server /var/www is the default dir for the redhat
apache rpm DocumentRoot.  mysql and postgresql also default to /var for
data.

if the server is doing imap for mail then your /home dirs will start
filling up as people file their messages in different folders.

You probably won't find much on the web because disk partitioning is
really dependent upon the function of the server.

I have about 14 users on a mail server and they take up about 2g in
their home dirs with their email, so don't underestimate what they can
accumulate.

RH7.2 insists on 2 x RAM for swap space.

If you break out /usr and /var from /, then / doesn't need to be that
big at all.


Summary, it all depends on what you want to do.  I would list as best
you can which applications you will be running.  Find out where they
keep their data.  Guess as best you can as to how much data they will
have and then partition appropriately.

FWIW,

Hugh

On Thu, 2002-04-18 at 18:43, Dhruva B. Reddy wrote:
> 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