[ale] Well, this is More Fun than I thought

[Steve Litt]

On Fri, 24 Jul 2020 20:37:11 -0400
Charles Shapiro via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> Finally decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my main desktop from
> Debian 8 to Debian 10. It had been a shameful two years since my last
> full upgrade.  Followed the Path of Least Resistance.  The original
> machine had a 1/2 TB drive partitioned into 8 gb of OS space, 18 gb
> of Swap, and the rest /home.  I was seriously running out of root and
> tmp space.  I've only filled up about 150 GB of my /home partition.
> I've got 12 GB of memory in this thing and I don't come close to
> using that up.
> 
> So I hopped down to my friendly neighborhood Micro Center and picked
> up a 120 gb SSD for a laughable $18. 

Nice!

> The hardest part of the hardware
> installation was squinching the data cable into the connector on the
> side of the motherboard.  BIOS recognized it right away.  A far cry
> from the Bad Old Days of fiddling with jumpers and entering
> cylinders/heads/sectors.
> 
> I partitioned half the SSD as OS and half as /tmp. 

You might want to reconsider that /tmp. /tmp gets written/erased all
the time, and that's bad for SSDs. On the other hand, my /tmp contains
only 48 MEGAbytes of data, so from a practical standpoint that's
probably not an issue if your /tmp is like mine. I mean, if the SSD
breaks in 3 years, you buy another one for $18, and that one will
probably be 512GB.

> lvm made it a
> Snap to use my old swap and mount my old /home partition. 

I'm not a fan of LVM because it's one more level of abstraction, and
it's one more level to drill through if something goes wrong. That's my
personal thing: I know a lot of people love LVM, especially those who
do encryption. But if you *didn't* want to LVM, you could also put a
mount to your current spinning rust /home in /etc/fstab.

I bet your computer is now *a lot* faster. Every program you load now
comes straight from electronics, not from a head moving to the right
place on a cylinder. 

The way I set my (5 year old, 16GB RAM) desktop up, I have a 256GB SSD
as my root partition, and mount my spinning rust hosted data partitions
like /home, /scratch, /d, /s, and /classic. All of those but /home are
Steve Litt creations, and all of them get written a lot except
/classic. So, like you, my OS is on SSD, but for my big data I get the
cheaper cost per GB of spinning rust for my big data.

Check out the following line from my /etc/fstab:

/scratch/gnome-boxes /home/slitt/.local/share/gnome-boxes none bind 0 0

I did the preceding because the gnome-boxes utility, which performs a
similar task as qemu and Virtualbox, defaults to putting huge disk
images in /home/slitt/.local/share/gnome-boxes, quickly overconsuming
the partition I use for /home. Meanwhile, I had no disk space left to
make a new partition and no desire to shrink an existing partition, and
also, I have no idea of my gnome-boxes needs for the future. No
problem: I used a bind-mount to my humongous 2.9TB /scratch partition,
which is normally used for big and/or miscellaneous stuff not needing
to be backed up. So my newly bind-mounted
/home/slitt/.local/share/gnome-boxes can now grow and shrink as needed,
without my having to tell it to (like with LVM).

Another nice thing about using a small SSD as / is that you don't have
to use UEFI: You can use old-style MBR BIOS, without losing disk space,
if you want to use MBR and if your mobo supports it. That's what I do.
I've heard a few too many stories of badly programmed mobo UEFI
firmware bricking the box if you alter or delete the wrong files within
your disk's UEFI partition.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
May 2020 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques
     of the Successful Technologist
http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques