Re: [SLUG] Partition type question

From: Jim Wildman (jim@rossberry.com)
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 14:14:03 EDT


Lots of geeks, lots of paradigms...

I ALWAYS put /var on a separate partition on a production server. It is
guaranteed to have open files and probably be somewhat corrupted in the
event of a crash. The size varies with the purpose of the server, but
for generic Linux servers, I've found 500M to be OK and 1G to be plenty.

Similarly /, /boot, will get their own, and maybe /usr/local. /home
and /opt definitely separate. The idea is create 'firebreaks' so that
when something bad happens, the damage is limited. You can also do some
things with mounting options (such as mounting /usr as ro)...season to
taste.

The backup issue has been a mute point for years, every since tar (and
its cousins, derivatives and replacements) learned to traverse file systems.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Wildman, CISSP jim@rossberry.com
http://www.rossberry.com

On 10 Sep 2002, Matt Miller wrote:

> On Tue, 2002-09-10 at 12:42, Smitty wrote:
> > I am going to transfer data from an old to a new harddrive. The new one is
> > double (40 gb) the size of the old (20 gb). The old has four partitions, one
> > for /, one for /boot, one for /home and one for swap. I believe these are
> > all primary partitions. I would like to have more partitions, namely one for
> > /var and /tmp together. Am I correct that I would need to use extended
> > partitions rather than primary?
>
> Yes. You could do 4 primary partitions or 3 primary and an extended
> partition with a theoretically unlimited number of logical partitions.
>
> > Do extended partitions create any corruption problems for data as opposed to
> > primary partitions?
>
> Not from my experience.
>
> > I noticed Russ Herrold puts each directory on a seperate extended partition.
> > Does this have advantages over keeping /bin, /sbin, /lib, /etc/, /usr, and
> > /opt together on the / partition?
>
> Not necessarily. Everyone has their file-system layout preferences. I am
> a /, /usr, /var, and /home kind of guy. Separating mount points
> logically on multiple partitions is great when scheduling varying file
> system dumps to tape. I believe someone in a previous thread already
> mentioned that some mount points (/, /bin, /sbin, /etc) have more
> persistent data, and therefore do not always need daily backups.
>
>



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