[LUNI] Look for some partitioning recommendations

[Martin Maney]

On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 03:42:03PM -0500, Michael Salsman wrote:
> I have just purchased a 120 GB drive for my Dell D610, and I am trying to 
> figure out the best way to partition the drive, so that my user data is 
> preserved as I dink around with different distros.

I'd originally replied to a later part of this thread (or are there two
partitioning threads today?), but discovered an error in last evening's
derangement of the mail setup.  Unfortunately, the bounce quoted the
whole of the orignal reply...

> I like the /home in /var/data idea!
>
> very practical.

As long as you're never going to wipe the OS and reinstall, maybe.  ;-/

I was long ago "converted" to the practice of using at least separate
root, tmp, var, usr, and home parititions, and in a recent
rebuild/upgrade I came up with a new, improved approach.  If the idea
of "wasting" separate partitions on things bothers you just stop
reading now...


What I ended up with for this desktop system looks something like this:

sda1        1G    root1     root (includes boot) for first OS image
sda2        1G    root2     root for 2nd OS image (currently ununsed)
sda3        the rest of the disk, used as a physical volume for LVM

logical volumes:

swap        2G    shared, of course
tmp         4G    shared!
var1        3G    var for image 1
usr1        7G    usr for image 1
var2        3G
usr2        7G
home      lots    home, shared data, all that stuff

the var filesystems are larger than I expect to need, but I do dabble
in web projects more and more (with larger and larger databases
attached), so I figured to give them some breathing space.  usr is
likewise larger than I've been using, and not because I've felt it was
getting tight, but there are always more packages to install "just for
a look"...  Oh, and /var is where apt stashes things, which has been a
concern during some of the more voluminous updates I've done recently.

I have long been using a 1G tmp, and hadn't come close to straining it
until I tried to use the convenient GUI tool to burn a CD from a set of
flac files: it insisted on expanding them all in /tmp before it did
anything else, and that didn't quite work.  :-(  So I've been planning
to upsize tmp for a while, and while I was planning this it struck me
that tmp's contents are at least notionally cleared out on reboot, and
I can't switch from running image 1 to image 2 without rebooting, so I
took the 2G I was going to settle for for each and rolled them into
one.

The objective is that next time I stick with an LTS release for a
while, I'll have somewhere convenient to setup the three-releases-later
version without having to swap drives around or any such.  In the
meantime, I can always reclaim the space if I really need it.  Hmmm,
wasn't that how I got to the point of needing to shuffle drives around
this time?  :-)

-- 
This is not the first time databases and file systems have
collided, merged, argued, and split up, and it won't be the last.
The specifics of whether you have a file system or a database
is a rather dull semantic dispute  -- Rob Pike