[NBLUG/talk] Partitioning a HD

Walter Hansen gandalf at sonic.net
Wed Dec 10 12:55:01 PST 2003


/var is also good to split becuase this is where generic web space goes
and I beleive MySql stores tables here by default. Splitting off var on a
server might be a good idea to keep it from blowing up when you run out of
web/database/mail/log space.

> 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
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