Recommended partitioning scheme

[David L Norris]

> > articles saying that /home and /usr should also be mounted on seperate 
> > partitions so that user data and installed programs can be saved in the 
> > event a reinstall is necessary.

Definitely /home and maybe /usr/local.  You may want to keep a periodic
backup of /etc and /var/log/rpmpkgs (the output from "rpm -qa").
But /usr should be completely managed by RPM and you can rebuild it from
the rpmpkgs log.

> If you are playing with FC3 test 1 I would not keep any critical files
> under that OS.  As such saving /home or /usr IMHO should be a mute
> question.  

I wouldn't risk exposing my primary /home to a test system.  You may,
however, want to copy some or all of your primary /home directory to the
test system.  This was mentioned on the -devel (or was it -test?) list
as a way to test that your home directory will actually work and migrate
to the new system.

I always maintain my /home directory from one system to the next.  But I
don't install test releases on my main machine.

> Much of this depends on what you plan to use the system for.  For a true
> multi-user server using different mount points for various directories
> is a good idea as it can prevent the server from dying if one of the
> less critical partitions are filled up for some reason.  (usually a user
> that generates tones of files for some reason causing / to fill up and
> halt the system.)  

Users can't completely fill a filesystem; only root can fill a
filesystem.  A portion (by default 10%) of each partition is reserved
for the system.  Users may be able to cause some services to complain
but the system itself should remain fairly operational.

> For a single user system IMHO this is not as important.  You can always
> backup the /home directory if you are doing an upgrade or re-install. 
> So for a workstation I normally setup a /boot, swap, and / file systems
> with the bulk of the space in the / file system.  

I always keep /home on its own disk(s).  This way it is completely
independent of the operating system itself.

> For a personal workstation put everything under /.  It will save you
> lots of headaches when you find that you guessed wrong and need a much
> larger /usr file system since you installed so many packages.  

Yep.


> > Drive 1
> > swap - 2gb
> > 
> > Drive 2
> > /boot - 100mb
> > /home - 20gb
> > /usr - 20gb
> > / - whatever space is left


On a test system I would do this:
  swap       2 GB
  /          (rest of disk)


On a full "production" system I would do something more like this:
  swap       2 GB (perhaps two 1 GB partitions on two disks)
  /boot    100 MB
  /         20 GB (or maybe 30-40 GB if you plan on going wild)
  /home    (very large RAID or LVM partition)


  I also do the following strictly so that after an OS upgrade I don't
have to reinstall weird, non-RPM, system-independent programs and shell
scripts I use (e.g. cross-compilers, etc).  But be very aware that /opt
and /usr/local will eventually "eat your branes(tm)" if you mess around
with the defaults in /etc/ld.so.conf and the PATH variable.
    /usr/local 10 GB (or whatever you think you will need)
    /opt       10 GB (or whatever...)


> How much memory do you have on your system?  Normally they recommend
> swap be twice what your memory is.  I usually consider 1GB for swap the
> most you should ever really need regardless of how much memory you
> have.  If you find you are using a lot of swap space then you probably
> need more memory

Depends on what you're doing.  Swap isn't all bad.  Running out of
physical RAM is very bad and some uses of swap can prevent that.  More
RAM is better but increasing the swap can be quite adequate for some
things.

For example, VMWare can benefit greatly by setting its temp directory
to /dev/shm, increasing the size of /dev/shm to 1 GB or more and adding
enough swap space to compensate.  It seems to prevent many unexplained
guest OS lockups and other problems.
 < http://www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=844 >

> Not sure having /usr as a separate file system will really save you
> anything during a reinstall.  If I was reinstalling /usr is probably one
> of the file systems I would want to replace completely.  Again if it was
> a multiuser system a separate /usr makes some sense. 

I don't think mounting /usr separately makes any sense on a standalone
system nor any RPM-based system.  It might have made more sense in the
past on some systems, I guess.  I've tried running standalone systems
this way and it typically does nothing but waste disk space.

> Excellent question!  I can not think of any reason you should not be
> able to use the same swap space for two different install of linux as
> long as they both are not trying to use it at the same time.

Sharing swap will work fine.  And, the installer should automatically
detect and setup all the available swap partitions.

-- 
 David Norris
  http://www.webaugur.com/dave/
  ICQ - 412039
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