[ale] "Recommended" Partitioning Layout ?

[Danny Cox]

Courtney:

On Mon, 26 Jun 2000, Courtney Thomas wrote:
> I'm installing a new 8 Gig HD and would appreciate guidance regarding
> "optimal" partitioning.
> 
> In more particular, with the present setup, I am getting the message
> when I.....
> 
> 	fdisk /dev/hda
> 
> 	"partition does not end on cylinder boundary"
> 
> Significance ?

	It's happened to me, but I had no problems.  Note: this is
simply MY experience.  It is NOT definitive!
 
> >From the perspective of security and backups, I'd be grateful for
> recommendations regarding /proc, swap, /boot, how many partitions of
> what type,....... 

	/proc doesn't take up disk space, so we can ignore it.

	/boot needs to be at the beginning, and small.  8 MB has been
plenty for me (given that kernels are compressed, and fit nicely on a
floppy, there is room for 8+ kernels plus the other lilo files that live
in /boot).  Usually, I have only 3 kernels: a known, reliable, working
kernel (vmlinuz.old), the current kernel (vmlinuz), and a new one that
I'm temporarily testing.  When proven reliable, I shift left, and
vmlinuz.old goes away.  Actually, I copy them in as
/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.14, and soft link the names lilo uses (vmlinuz,
vmlinuz.old, and vmlinuz.new).

	swap, as a rule of thumb should be 2 times physical RAM size.
This is from yesteryear, when UNIX swapped: that is, whole processes
were copied to and from the swap device.  Nowadays, most processes are
paged in 4k chunks, but I still lean toward the conservative approach.

	/ should be it's own partition.  With 8 GB, 1 gig should do it.
It needs to be writable, as this is where pipes are created (among other
things like configuration files).

	/tmp can be it's own partition, but it's only helpful if it's on
another physical spindle.

	/usr can be seperate, and even shared, read-only.  Once things
are nailed down here, you never have to change it.  Of course,
/usr/local should be r/w.  2GB may suffice.

	/var should be seperate, but r/w.  .5 - 1 GB.

	/home should be r/w, and the rest of the disk.

	/opt is what lots of folks use for optional packages like KDE,
WorkPerfect, Informix, Ingres, PostgreSQL, MySql, ....  If it's part of
/, / should be larger than 1 GB.

	I hope this helps!

Danny

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