[RndTbl] Partitioning in Linux

[Sean Cody]

In *BSD making separate slices for non root file systems is a very good idea for hardening and debugging service configurations (such as the 'nodev','nosuid' mount options... 'nosuid' has exposed some qmail issues I never considered prior to not having this option).

As well slicing and dicing also becomes academic if you use the full size of the drives (also allows you to move the slices around by adding drives/space).  Lock step change management style environments would prefer slicing and dicing to keep the allocation size as small as possible and limited to known/a priori style resource management and allows one to grow an FS in place (such as you gave /var 99% of your disk when you could have used 20% and grown other slices based on host specific growth patterns).

Then again if your hosts are internal then simpler is better and I agree with Adam there (though I would put swap on sda2 and sda1 on root but that's largely academic and Adam's probably right depending on hardware layout).

When I design servers I try and fit the shipping OS into 10GB or less and leave the rest for variable growth mounts like /tmp,/var,/opt,/home.  In a pinch, being able to grow or zone say /var/log to a new slice allows you to keep /var in place but lessen pressure /var/log is placing on that slice.  Anyways that's my two cents (refunds not available).

-- 
Sean (mobile)

On 2011-06-10, at 1:43 PM, "Adam Thompson" <athompso at athompso.net> wrote:

> I’ve taken to making my life as simple as possible:
> /dev/sda1 = swap
> /dev/sda2 = root (including everything else)
>  
> No LVM, no RAID (assuming HW RAID or VM instead).
>  
> I haven’t run into a system that can’t boot off a large root partition in quite some time, and I don’t have any systems running root FS types that aren’t bootable, either.
> The fewer things I have to remember about how a system is configured, the better, from my perspective.
> -Adam
>  
> From: roundtable-bounces at muug.mb.ca [mailto:roundtable-bounces at muug.mb.ca] On Behalf Of Kevin McGregor
> Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2011 19:21
> To: MUUG Roundtable
> Subject: [RndTbl] Partitioning in Linux
>  
> Well, not really partitioning. I know how to do that. At work today, the question of how to set up some Linux servers arose. To put it in some kind of context, when I install Ubuntu Linux (server), by default it creates a small /boot partition, the creates a LVM partition with a / ext4 partition and a swap partition inside of that.
>  
> Is that optimal? Recommended? Some would say that /home, /tmp, /var and others should reside in separate partitions/filesystems. Discuss. :-)
>  
> Thanks for any input!
>  
> Kevin
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