[wplug] partitioning

[Bill Moran]

PGHConsult Lists wrote:
> Ok, so I'm used to Redhat which partitions everything for you and now 
> I'm installing Debian which does not. I'm looking for a little advice on 
> how to best partition the HD. It's a 20GB disk and this machine will be 
> used to run 4 or 5 network apps. No users other than myself. Here's what 
> I've come up with so far.
> 
> Swap - 1GB
> / - 500 MB
> /usr - 9 GB
> /tmp - 100 MB
> /home - 200 MB
> /var - 9 GB
> /boot - 20 MB
> 
> I realize that some of these values are rather large given my 
> requirements but I'm also trying to get an idea of how others partition 
> their servers for general use. Should some values stay static (i.e. 20 
> MB for boot) while others consume a % of available disk space (i.e. 30% 
> for /var)?
> 
> As always all help is appreciated.

What you've done looks pretty rational to me.

The /var partition depends on a lot of things.  First off, Linux apps tend
to put more in /var than BSD apps do (for example, PostgreSQL installed on
FreeBSD puts the default database config in /usr, while installed on Linux
the default is in /var ... ??)

So the size of /var depends on a lot of factors.  For a desktop BSD machine,
I usually make /var a few hundred meg and seldom see it fill more than 20%.
This is because a desktop machine isn't putting much in /var other than
logs, and a desktop machine doesn't have a lot to log ... with rotation,
you seldom use very much space.

With a server you have a number of factors to consider with regard to /var,
one being the fact that there's probably a lot more logging going on, and
you're probably going to want to adjust log rotation to keep more logs
around.

In addition to that, your server apps may keep other data in /var (many
email servers keep data in /var ... MySQL and Postgres on Linux will put
their database files in /var by default) so you have to take that into
account prior to sizing /var.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com