On the merits of various partitioning schemes

Post #196,049

2/23/05 3:35:49 AM

One of our number is currently having enormous fun in the world of commodity PC laptops; one's gone back (effectively DOA - the disk was bad) and he's currently installing his OS of choice onto the replacement.

I say that you should always have a separate /home partition[0] so that when you come to reinstall, you don't lose your settings and stuff. Sure, you should have backups, but who wants to depend on those?

The happy fun installer boy says not, and simply restores from backup every time he reinstalls.

For desktop-type boxes I don't believe in the extravagant partitioning schemes you'll see on the webarnet (you know: 10MB /boot, 100MB /, 2G /var, 500MB /tmp noexec, 1G /usr/local, etc etc etc). Servers require different treatment, but in this age of 200GB disks I don't think you should partition for space reasons but rather for security (noexec on /tmp being the canonical, perhaps a read-only /usr) ones.

But I still make a separate /home.

What does the IGM think?

[0] Even for a single user, yes. Especially for a single user, because that single user is gonna be YOU, right? AKA "The only user whose data I REALLY care about".

Post #196,052

by imric

2/23/05 6:55:04 AM

Exception:

machines with very small HDD.

I have a laptop split twixt W2k and Debian - it only has a 6gb hd. Originally I had split out /home, but since I rarely filled /home, and filled / quite often, when I installed Meps, I set everything under /. Far less of a PITA.

That's the only good exception I can think of, though.

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Post #196,077

by scoenye

2/23/05 11:18:56 AM

And /var

Since that is where Debian parks part of your data by default as well.

These days I normally have 4:

/boot: ext2 just in case I end up with a rescue disk that doesn't understand anything else
/, /home and /var: reiserfs partitions sized to the expected use of the machine.

Post #196,090

by pwhysall

2/23/05 12:00:43 PM

Reasonable.

I don't care about /var for a desktop box, but for a server it's kinda sensitive :-)

Post #196,098

by Andrew Grygus

2/23/05 12:52:08 PM

Partitions

Since all my Linux servers are Samba servers or accounting servers serving terminl emulator logins I don't make a separate /home, but I do make a separate /u partition where all the accounting data and all the Samba shares reside, and where copies of all the special driver and application files I've added and copies of all the scripts reside.

For a desktop machine I'd definitely have a separate /home partition because most desktop applications store all their stuff there.

And no, I never depend on backups if there is any alternative.

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Post #196,104

by folkert

2/23/05 1:58:31 PM

Since I use servers for things at home and work...

[greg@duke:~]$ df\nFilesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on\n/dev/hda3             48739616  26642228  19621540  58% /\ntmpfs                   517872       780    517092   1% /dev/shm\n/dev/hda1               151255     18046    125399  13% /boot\nnone                      5120      2868      2252  57% /dev\npaladin:/home        118177000  49688864  68422600  43% /home\npaladin:/shared      118733216  10040264 108627416   9% /shared\npaladin:/music       157566600 112662784  44838280  72% /music\npaladin:/publish     241263968 104949568 136248864  44% /publish\n[greg@duke:~]$

Though that is likely to change realtively soon.

I have a batch of 200G and 250G drives. I might actually have the machine done sometime soon, too.

No matter how much Microsoft supporters whine about how Linux and other operating systems have just as many bugs as their operating systems do, the bottom line is that the serious, gut-wrenching problems happen on Windows, not on Linux, not on Mac OS. -- [link|http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1622086,00.asp|source]

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