Subject: Re: Disk partitions (Was: Upgrading from 1.1 to 1.2)
From: Jim Cole (greyleaf@yggdrasill.net)
Date: Wed Mar 08 2000 - 09:30:16 MST
Paul J. Lucas's bits of Tue, 7 Mar 2000 translated to:
>On Tue, 7 Mar 2000, Jim Cole wrote:
>
>> Partitioning is always a bit of a guessing game, but based on what you have
>> said, I would probably suggest about 1 GB /, 128 MB swap, and the rest on
>> a /home partition.
>
> 1 GB for / seems excessive. What I would recommend and why:
Excessive? How so? I was recommending a configuration with two data
partitions + swap. Your suggestions below are *far* more excessive.
In essence you are suggestion something like 2.4 GB where I am
suggesting 1 GB. You are also allocating more than the 4 GB he had
available ;)
>
> 256 MB swap
>
> A simple formula: swap = 2 x memory (I have 127
> MB of memory).
In my opinion this formula is greatly outdated. In a well configured
system, there is never a need for more than 128 MB of swap. If that
need ever arises, it is a sure sign that you desperately need more RAM.
The rest is the part I referred to as a guessing game. If you try to
do this type of partitioning and *really* know your needs, that is
cool. And what you have looks quite reasonable. However what many
people tend to do when trying this approach is to partition themselves
into a complete reinstall not too far down the road. If they go a bit
too small on any critical partition, sooner or later they will have to
reformat the drive to fix the problem. If they go too small on a not
so critical partition, they will need to start playing games with
symbolic links to keep the system usable. Besides, this type of
partitioning buys you very little; to some degree it is a hold over
from the days when hard drives were not particularly reliable. Other
than for very flexible backup, as you suggest, and which can be done
in other ways, there is much reason to use this type of partitioning.
At least not in my experience or opinion :)
> 50 MB /var
>
> This is plenty for mail, logs, etc., unless you
> have a lot going on or a lot of users with mail.
> /var is separate from / since it's contents are
> VARiable (as the name implies), so it ought to be
> on a speparate partition could be backed up more
> frequently than / that almost never changes.
>
> 256 MB /
>
> This is plenty for / is you have /usr on a
> separate partition. I like to keep the core OS
> stuff by itself. This would have to be backed
> up seldomly.
>
> 2+ GB /usr
>
> This is big since this is where the bulk of
> the software goes (RPMS).
>
> 1 GB /home
>
> Also big if you have a lot of users. (In my
> case, I'm the only user on the machine, so I
> gave myself 1 GB.)
>
> I intentionally keey /home separate from /usr
> since the former would need to be backed up much
> more frequently than the latter.
>
> 100 MB /mnt/ziphd
>
> I created a Zip-disk-sized MacOS partition that
> I automount at boot. This is useful for
> transferring files bank and for to the MacOS
> side if you're paranoid about mounting your
> entire MacOS partition under Linux.
>
> 1 GB MacHD
>
> This is the MacOS bootable partition with my Mac
> software. THis is plenty for what I have on it.
> (I still have about 600 MB free.)
>
> Also note that I laid out the swap partition first to be on the
> outer (faster) tracks; similarly, I put the Mac partitions last
> since they will be the least used.
>
> - Paul
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Sun Apr 02 2000 - 21:09:30 MDT