Richard Kettlewell wrote on Friday, November 15, 2002 6:32 PM
"Michael Sage" michael.sage@pitman-norwich.co.uk writes:
This is a really silly but quite important question, how do u determin how you partition your harddrive?
I have just got an 80Gb Hdd for our new Linux Fileserver, I was thinking something like this:
/ 2Gb /tmp 2Gb /var 4Gb /usr 5Gb /usr/local 5Gb /home 60Gb swap 2Gb
Why bother separating /, /usr and /usr/local into separate filesystems, BTW? I can see why a separate / makes sense if there's only limited space for the root filesystem, but that's evidently not the case here...
The glib answer I suppose is another question "what are you trying to do?". More practically, after far too many years setting up and maintaining servers on various systems, I've found it best to be very pragmatic about partitioning servers under any OS. Predicting where the growth is going to be can be difficult. What's the phrase? "Past performance is no indication of future growth!" seems to apply just as much to disk usage as the stock market.
My usual approach is to try and separate high activity from low activity areas e.g. things which change a lot mail. spooling, temporary, etc from things like libraries, executables. etc. which are more static. This tends to help with backup strategies etc. It seems to me you have consciously or unconsciously done this :o)
I would always try and initially keep a good chunk of the disk unallocated so I can extend partitions that were initially undersized. One of the things I like about the unix filesystem model is it's easy to do this. If you find that there's one particular subdirectory that's dominating the partition you can set up another and just mount it at the appropriate point. Growing filesystems/partitons is not so easy with MS Windows (PartitionMagic was a Godsend!).
So I would have partitioned something like;
swap 512Mb / 2Gb /boot 2Gb (not really necessary nowadays but I got into the habit of this when the early larger disks appeared and it's stuck) /tmp 2Gb /var 2Gb /usr 4Gb /usr/local 4Gb /home 8Gb - I'm assuming you have existing user space to cater for and this might need to be bigger or even smaller. Do you use quaotas to manage this?
leaving 55.5Gb unallocated. Then see where your hotspots are and use this accordingly.
Regards,
Keith