Root partition size and configuration

[Guy Fraser]

On Tue, 2005-11-01 at 18:25 -0800, Alberto M R Davila wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I use FC1 and initially setup my / partition with 5.5GB, then just
> realized it is a bit small for a server configuration (I already have
> /usr/local = 20GB, /boot = 100MB and /home = 5GB) ... I did not know mysql
> will put the databases under /var and that /usr/lib would be big as
> well... so my problem now is how to expand the size of "/" without
> re-install ?
> 
> Also, would it be better to try to move (or redirect with a symlink) /var
> and/or /usr/lib ? Finally, I installed the mysql RPM distributed with the
> distribution so, is there a way to tell it to use /usr/local to store
> databases ?
> 
> Thanks, Alberto
Yikes, I don't think so.

I usually never have / larger than 1GB.

These are the partitions I normaly set up on a mail server :

/ = 512MB
/boot = 256MB
/tmp = 1GB
/var = 1GB
/var/log = 1GB
/var/spool = 1GB
/var/spool/mail = large if mail stored here
/home = 1GB or large if mail stored here
/usr = 2GB - 6GB depending on packages
/opt = 1GB

By separating the different storage areas out, you can ensure 
that certain anomalies do not shut down your server. An example 
I have seen is log files using up too much space and causing 
/var or / to be full.

Sometimes you will need to move around large files, and if you 
have a extra space in /opt or /tmp you can you it.

Every server requires storage in different locations, depending 
on what it is used for, and where the application data is stored.

With the cheap cost of storage, you don't need to be too stingy.

If you need expensive fast SCSI RAID on your server, you can 
still use IDE for storing data that doesn't require super IO
speeds and or redundancy.