[Cialug] Partitioning schemes

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Fri, 2006-12-22 at 23:19 -0600, Marc Read wrote:
> ...  When setting up a desktop i have just used a big / partiong and
> then a swap. 
> 
> I'm setting up a little "test" server at my house with a old 1ghz
> machine and wanted it to be semi-professonlay set up (unlike the lazy
> 2 partion deskop setup).  this box would provide FTP, web, and mysql
> services. 
> 
> Here are my thoughts
> 
> / - 1gig
> /var/log - 1gig
> /var/www - 5gig (but not real sure)
> /var/ftp - 5gig
> /usr/home - 10 gig (not sure if this should be /home)
> 
> I have also heard some talk about using /srv as the http, and ftp
> directorys 

I've spent way too much time thinking about/messing with this in the
past. Here is my reasoning:

Desktop:
/
/home
/boot (if you have special booting needs)
[swap]

The reason I do this is because it makes upgrading the OS much easier if
you decide you want to do a clean install. For example, with a modern
Ubuntu install on my laptop w/ 120GB disk I do
/ 20GB
/ home 75GB
[swap 2G]
(rest to Windows for when I want to download video from Amazon
Unboxed :)
This allowed me to format the install drive and start clean while
keeping all of my preferences and files safe.

For servers, it depends on what type of server it is. For plain old
webhosting, I do just
/
/boot (sometimes)
[swap]

For postgres (and presumably mysql or oracle) things work better with
multiple drives, so then I put the various postgres files on different
file systems on *different drives*

I know some people who put all program files on a read only partition.

Whatever you do, use LVM. (I don't on my laptop but do every where else)

By the way, the ext2fs driver for Windows works really nice. So you can
just boot into Windows and map /home to a drive letter and access your
linux files from Windows. As a matter of fact, it works so well, I've
wondered about the possibility of installing programs and etc to it.
-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode