Re: Linux Partitioning Layout

bob wrote:
I need help with partitioning DELL PowerEdge 2950 server
(web application and database production server - Linux, Apache,
PHP,MySQL)
It has 16GB memory
Primary Controller PERC6i SAS RAID Controller

I am trying to install CentOS 5.2 and I have just arrived to the point
where I am to create partitioning for:

sda 146GB (2 x 146GB Serial-Attach SCSI) hardware RAID 1
sdb 146GB (4 x 73GB Serial-Attach SCSI) hardware RAID 10

What Partitioning Scheme would you recommend?
So far I have this

======================================
Device Mount Point File System Type Size

/dev/sda /boot ext3 100 MB

/dev/sdb /swap ext3 16 GB

I do not know where to create the following mount points and at what
sizes and whether I even need all of those
/
/var
/usr
/home
/tmp
/proc
/opt

Thank you

OK, now we're into a religious subject, one involved in great movements and history and heresies, I say, heresies.

/ - be generous. 20 Gig, minimum, in case you need to do bulky things like download a DVD or some crappy installation software puts things in unexpected places. (Oracle used to be horrid about this.)

Swap - 16 Gig

/proc - that's a fake sort of filesystem, a hook into the kernel where it publishes and receives information about itself as files. No space is allocated for it.

/boot - old grub and LILO boot partition, occasionally useful if you want / to be an exotic filesyste like reiserfs (which I don't recommend: use ext3). 100 Meg is typical.

/tmp, /usr/tmp, /var/tmp - Only make partitions and space for these if you're trying to minimize /. Modern backup systems will skip these gracefully, so no need to worry about putting them on their own partition to avoid backups

/usr - Modern systems are *unhappy* if /usr is another partition, because if you can't mount /usr, you can't mount /usr/bin/. It can be done, but there's really a great point to it when disk is so cheap.

/home - depends on your uses. If people need to do develpment in their home directory, and you want a separate backup schedule, fine.

/var - depends on how much actual data you're storing, and if you want to protect / from overflowing /var. Typically, it's better to make a partition for /var/spool or /var/lib/mysql or /var/www, and allocate those for your specific tasks, to avoid overflow surprises.

/opt - Unless you're installing Oracle, or other commercial packages, don't bother.

But leave yourself your spare space for expansion, or projects. You can comfortably run a quite flexible and powerful RHEL 5, or CentOS 5, on a single 20 Gig partition for / with a few gig for swap.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: fat32/NTFS which order?
    ... >and have xp home edition installed and I'll have a 15 gig partition ... >for moving files from linux to windows and back again. ... last as I was sure that grub installations break the Xp install... ...
    (alt.os.linux.suse)
  • Re: Dual boot on Sata 300gig
    ... Then install Opensuse 10.3 on the extended linux ... partitions A swap of 2 gig, root 20 gig and home 178 gig. ... corrupting my NTFS partition. ...
    (alt.os.linux.suse)
  • Re: Befudled- iMac, OS 10.2.8, Firefox
    ... I installed a 20 gig hard disk, partitioned it into two 3.8 gig and a ... copied the OS 9 over from the old disk to the first ... partition, then installed OS 10.2 on the second 3.8 gig partition. ... I then downloaded Firefox and I'm trying to install it but ...
    (comp.sys.mac.apps)
  • Re: Befudled- iMac, OS 10.2.8, Firefox
    ... I installed a 20 gig hard disk, partitioned it into two 3.8 gig and a ... copied the OS 9 over from the old disk to the first ... partition, then installed OS 10.2 on the second 3.8 gig partition. ... I then downloaded Firefox and I'm trying to install it but ...
    (comp.sys.mac.apps)
  • Re: CentOS installation headache
    ... I'm trying to install CentOS v5.1, which I got as a DVD from linux central. ... that I haven't defined a /root partition. ... old drives can be very temperamental. ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)