Re: Partitioning

["Ben Holland" <user=122@nabble.blu.org>]

 I take the more... I dunno I would say "old school" approach as for a home 
system I have never really found a need for LVMs. With that being said I 
have it looking like this: 

/dev/sda1: Boot 
/dev/sda2: swap 
/dev/sda3: home The amount of times I have had to blow away my system I have 
found just deleting /dev/sda4 to be a much nicer approach. I also make this 
take up about all but 50 or 100 gigs of my hard drive. 
IE: with a 500 gig hard drive this will have around 400 or 450 gigs. 
/dev/sda4: Extended with the rest of my disk 
/dev/sda5: / 
/dev/sda6: /usr (just, and purely just in case I ever decide to make it a 
read only partition) 
/dev/sda7: /etc (because don't you just hate to loose all those custom 
config files?) 

When I was on gentoo I also had a partition for the tree. This actually did 
speed up the update time, but of course it took an inordinate amount of time 
already so I suppose it didn't buy me much. I can't even remember what it 
was called... I really should know, I was on that platform for long enough. 
grr. ~Ben 

For backup media: 
/dev/sdb on something like /media or /home/media or something like that 

I haven't ever raided my home comp though I know I should. Alternatively I 
have built it with /media and /home splitting the second hard drive and 
giving large chunks of blocks to /usr but with disks so cheep I could 
actually just give all of em 
the same amount and assume that the only thing that will really grow would 
be home. I don't really like playing with lvms mostly because I like to know 
that if I write a bits to a disk, where that disk is and exactly what 
partition it's actually getting written to. This may be way too anal but 
thats just a preference of mine. ~Ben 

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 11:35 AM, Jerry Feldman <[hidden email]> wrote: 

> This is similar to how I set up my servers in my office where I have 2 
> 300GB and 5 72GB SCSI drives.  Your comment about naming the volume 
> groups is well taken. When I first set things up, I didn't do that and 
> it created a bunch of problems for me when I wanted to move things 
> around. However, you can easily rename volume groups and logical 
> volumes but not while mounted. The way I have things set up now is: 
> /dev/sda1 
> /dev/sda2       LVM  Root and swap are on a dedicated 72GB on all my 
> servers. This allows me to physically move everything to any of the 6 
> X86_64 servers we have. it also makes it a lot easier for us to upgrade 
> to the current version of the OS supported by our company for 
> development. 
> 
> On Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:05:56 -0400 
> John Abreau <[hidden email]> wrote: 
> 
> > My preferred partitioning, without Windows, is 
> > 
> >     /dev/md0     /boot 
> >     /dev/md1     LVM 
> > 
> > where both md devices are RAID-1 devices spanning two 
> > identical drives. Then when I create the volume group, 
> > I give it a unique name based on the server's hostname, 
> > to avoid naming conflicts if I ever need to put the disks 
> > in a different machine for emergency maintenance, 
> > and name each volume for its purpose, e.g. "root' for /, 
> > "var' for /var, "swap" for the swap volume, etc. 
> > 
> > When I create the volumes, I set their sizes failry small, 
> > and then grow them as needed, so i don't end up wasting 
> > space in one filesystem while running out on another. 
> > 
> > As the system's storage needs grow, I can add additional 
> > RAID-1 sets to the volume group, or I can upgrade to 
> > larger drives by adding the larger RAID-1 volume, 
> > pvmove'ing everything off the smaller volume, and 
> > removing the smaller volume from the volume group. 
> > I did this a few months ago to upgrade one of the BLU 
> > servers from a single 80 GB drive to a RAID-1 pair of 
> > 750 GB drives, and the process went smoothly. 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Jerry Feldman wrote: 
> > > The subject of partitioning comes up every once in a while. 
> > > Generally on my systems at home, I create an extended partition in the 
> > > first primary, and create root, home, and possibly /usr/local. At work, 
> > > I've been using LVM.  For installfests, I generally shrink down the 
> > > Windows partition and create an extended in one of the remaining 
> > > primaries. (Windows usually takes up 2 partitions one for Windows, and 
> > > another for restores). 
> > > 
> > > I generally don't bother with a dedicated /boot partition, but thee are 
> > > some pros and cons. The /boot partition cannot be part of LVM so on LVM 
> > > installations you need /boot as a separate partition.  In any cases 
> > > there are a number of pros and cons regarding the use of a separate 
> > > partition for /boot. One of the major reasons for /boot is that the 
> > > GRUB stage 2 must be within the first 1024 cylinders because of the 
> > > limitations of the MBR. 
> > > 
> > > Currently, as technology moves forward and disks become faster and more 
> > > dense we are still locked to the old technology: 
> > > 
> > > 4 Primary partitions - this is a physical limitation of the partition 
> > > table. 
> > > 
> > > A maximum of 16 logical partitions. I'm not sure if this is a 
> > > limitation imposed by libata or by Windows. I've never been constrained 
> > > by this. 
> > > 
> > > At this time, I'm just starting another discussion of how people 
> > > partition their home systems. There are a lot of other factors that 
> > > affect how systems are going to be used at work and is beyond the scope 
> > > here. 
> > > 
> > > So, here is my preferred partitioning scheme with no Windows(either 
> > > sda or hda: 
> > > /dev/sda1   Extended 
> > > /dev/sda5      Logical              / (root) 
> > > /dev/sda6   Swap 
> > > /dev/sda7   Logical         /home 
> > > On my 160G HD I also have an additional partition whee I keep 
> > > downloads, and ISOs. Currently, I don't use a separate /usr/local since 
> > > I would prefer to rebuild or reinstall the stuff I use in /usr/local. 
> > > 
> > > In a typical Windows XP or Vista installation at installfests. 
> > > Additionally, I either use the Windows resize utility to resize the 
> > > partition, QTPated or GNU Parted. I do not use the Distribution's 
> > > partitioning. My procedure is to first reduce the size of the Windows 
> > > C: partition, then immediately boot into Windows to make sure 
> > > everything works.  This way I have a reasonably good chance that the 
> > > Linux install does not damage Windows. I then edit /boot/menu.lst to 
> > > delete the second Windows boot entry pointing to the D: partition. 
> > > 
> > > /dev/sda1   Primary NTFS    Windows C: 
> > >                                                     Defragged and 
> > >                                                     reduced. 
> > > /dev/sda2   Primary NTFS    Windows D: 
> > >                                                     Normally hidden 
> > > /dev/sda3   Extended 
> > > /dev/sda5   Logical                 / (root) 
> > > /dev/sda6   Swap 
> > > /dev/sda7   Logical                 /home 
> > > These days I generally use ext3 since SuSE has pretty much forsaken 
> > > ReiserFS. 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > -- 
> > > Jerry Feldman <[hidden email]> 
> > > Boston Linux and Unix 
> > > PGP key id: 537C5846 
> > > PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846 
> > > 
> > > 
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> > 
> > -- 
> > John Abreau 
> > IT Manager 
> > Zuken USA 
> > 238 Littleton Rd., Suite 100 
> > Westford, MA 01886 
> > T: 978-392-1777            F: 978-692-4725 
> > M: 978-764-8934 
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> > 
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> 
> -- 
> -- 
> Jerry Feldman <[hidden email]> 
> Boston Linux and Unix 
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