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Partitioning Advice

From Stock Watch on Fri, 15 Oct 1999

Greetings James,

Hi, I'm Wong. I need your advice on how to partition a 6.2GB hard disk so that it can optimize the usage of Linux. This is my first time installing Linux. I intend to set it as a full Linux server. The main purpose of the Linux server is to act as a mail server besides doing other functions. I also learn that it need a swap partition. Please advice. Thanks in advance.

Cheers, Wong

This is a very common question. There are differing views and philosophies on the subject as well.

Here's my suggestions:

		/boot	 	  31Mb
		/		 127Mb
		(swap)		 127Mb
		/usr		1635Mb (1.5Gb)
		/tmp		 127Mb
		/home		2047Mb  (2Gb)
		/var		(rest: ~3Gb)

... and on some systems I'd add other filesystems on another drive. For example a filesystem on /var/spool/mail can be mounted with the "sync" (insuring that all writes to that filesystem are done synchronously --- minimizing the damage down by a power failure).

This set of values is based on years of experience. It leaves plenty of room for extra kernels, initrd images and System.map files on /boot, gives plenty of room for paging (swap). /usr is big enough to install LOTS of software. If this was going to be used exclusively as a mail server then you don't need anywhere near that much space on /usr. Of course you shouldn't need anywhere neer 3Gb for normal mail and POP services either.

That should get you started. If you find that you do manage to outgrow your disk space, you can add additional drives pretty easily. I've described that process in previous Answer Guy columns.

Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 48 December 1999

HTML transformation by Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services, http://www.starshine.org/

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