[NBLUG/talk] Partitioning a HD

[Kyle Rankin]

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 09:45:13AM -0800, Todd Cary wrote:
> I would like to get some suggestions from Server administrators on the 
> "best way" to partitioning a HD realizing this is a very open ended 
> question.
> 
> My hardware setup is one 40 GB HD with RAID 1 and one 80 GB HD with RAID 
> 1.  My intent would be to put data on the 80 GB HD and system oriented 
> partitions on the 40 GB HD - 4 HD's in total.
> 
> On my Windows setup, all programs go on the C: drive which runs on a 
> RAID 1 drive...data is on the D: drive - a RAID 0 drive.
> -- 
> 

Like all open ended questions, the answer is "it depends" :)

What kind of server is this?  There are various reasons for partitioning
out your hard drive and mounting various parts of / on different partitions
(the ultimate goal is to make the actual / /bin and /sbin as small as
possible so you have a core there that might be safe if another partition
goes kablooey).  All of the different reasons apply with different weight
depending on what server you have.  Some (fairly general) for instances:

/home:
Especially on desktop systems, this is the one partition that often splits
off from /.  Usually it is so that you can keep your per-user configuration
in its own safe partition, change distributions (or have multiple
distributions on the same computer) and have none of your personal settings
change.

/usr:
On a server that won't have its packages changed much, some people choose
to split off all of /usr (perhaps apart from /usr/local) and mount it
read-only, since after everything is set up, you generally don't need to
write to /usr until you install a new package, and having a read-only /usr
makes certain things more difficult for attackers.

/boot:
Sometimes you might want to split off a small (50-100Mb at the most) boot
partition so that your kernels are in a nice little safe partition.  Back
when problems occurred with booting systems past 1024 cylinders, people
would also split off /boot so their bios could find the kernel in the first
place.  Sometimes I like splitting this off just in the case of another
partition being corrupted, I still have a working kernel I may use for
recovery.

/var:
On some servers that potentially create a lot of logs, you might want to
split off /var into its own partition so that if the logs in /var get huge
and fill up the partition, the rest of your system should continue
functioning (albeit complaining about not being able to write to logs).  On
a mailserver, you might want to move /var off to a faster and larger hard
drive simply because of all the disk access that would occur there.

All this being said, usually the only partition I split off is /home on my
desktops, and on my servers I often don't really have the need to split off
any partitions at all.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org