Partitioning *nix

[Warren Togami]

Linux kernel 2.4 REQUIRES swap to be twice your amount of RAM, or bad things
happen in medium/high load.  Linus and Alan Cox have repeated this mantra
over and over again.  I still don't know why they say so, but do it!  Also
keep in mind that the beginning of the hard drive is faster than the end, so
I always suggest making the swap partition at the very beginning of the
drive.

If the hard drive is less than 8GB, then you are probably fine making all
non-swap space into a big partition for Linux mounted as root "/".  However,
most older computers BIOS cannot handle LILO booting from a partition above
cylinder 1024, so if your hard drive is larger than 1024 cylinders (usually
8GB in LBA access) then you will need a /boot partition below 1024
cylinders.  Win98 and 2000 has this same limitation when booting on x86
hardware.

If it is a single user system, I don't really care about performance and
filesystem fragmentation so I just put everything into one big /...
especially if the hard drive is small.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dusty" <dusty at sandust.com>
To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at list.luau.hi.net>
Cc: <recipient list not shown:>
Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2001 3:24 PM
Subject: [luau] Partitioning *nix




>
> Typically make swap the same size as you RAM and no more than twice your
RAM.  You can use less swap if you will not be doing anything memory
intensive, but some systems won't run without a swap.
>
> If the system is going to be a server for anything then you should break
out /var.  Things like mail (/var/spool/mail), print server
(/var/spool/lpd), logs (/var/logs), http (/var/www/htdocs), etc.  The reason
you want to break this out is so /var doesn't fill up you / partition.  It
is possible that your system could get so many error messages (someone
trying to port scan) or so much mail from an overly active list or printing
a 5,000,000 page document that /var would comsune your entire harddrive.
When / runs out of space all kinds of wierd things can happen from not being
able to log in, the system crashing.  If you don't have a high traffic
server you won't need much space for /var (I have 32MB on my sparc5 for
logs, mail, and web and it stays 50%).  If my 32MB /var fills up oh well, I
just get more errors that the system can't write and I have to delete some
stuff, but my / is safe.
>
> Other partitions that could be useful to have are /usr and /opt and
/usr/home.  /usr is where most of you programs are stored (unless you are on
an old style system like Solaris or Suse who use /opt for optional
software).  /usr/home (or the like) is where your users keep their personal
files.  If you have a lot of users and don't use quotas bob could try and
download the latest .iso images for his five favorite distributions onto
your 500MB harddrive.  Again this would fill your / and bad things happen.
>
> What I typically do for my home systems is just / and swap (my girlfriend
is a *nix geek too).  On my home severs I create /, /var, and swap.
Productions servers in a data center really require you to look at what they
will be used for and partition them out for their specific job.
>
> Dusty
>
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