[plug] Partitioning Hard Disk

[Leon Brooks]

On Wed, 25 Sep 2002 18:05, Steve Grasso wrote:
> Also, do you have 1GB of RAM in that machine? If not, a general rule of
> thumb is to size the swap partition according to the amount of RAM you
> intend having in the machine.

Actually, the rule of thumb is double the RAM, but in a high-performance 
desktop machine it's going to be abominably slow anyway if it fills up 512MB.

Also, there's not much point in having a separate boot partition after giving 
10GB over to something else. If you wanted a separate boot partition, I would 
do this, in this order:

20MB	primary    /boot
1GB     primary    swap
10GB    primary    XP
rest    secondary  /

If you want to complicate your life, and know about how much space the 
packages you are going to install will take up, I use and recommend the 
following rules of thumb:

/tmp   (roughly) 100MB, vary according to available space and needs
/usr   size of packages plus some elbow room
/var   \ if this is to be predominantly a server, make var huge and home
/home  / small; if this is to be predominantly a workstation or store
         many individual user files (think SaMBa), reverse that.

I use ext3 where possible. ReiserFS is too complicated and ext2 has no 
journalling.

When installation is done, mount /usr and /boot readonly,nodev; and mount 
/tmp, /home and /var nosuid,nodev. Under certain circumstances, you can also 
leave / mounted readonly, and this is an excellent security measure.

If your /home partition will only have data stored on it (no Linux programs 
that you expect to run on this machine), you can mount it noexec instead of 
just nosuid. You might also try doing this with /var but odd bits of /var 
(like /var/tmp) will be used for writing and executing temporary scripts by 
some services, so those services (if you happen to be running them) will 
fail.

When sizing /usr, you might want to do a trial install and see. A minimalist 
Debian server install without doc packages might need 100MB (LS-120 
territory), a totally kitchen-sink Mandrake 9.0 with contribs and all of the 
chrome, bells and whistles you can find will soak up over 4GB. Most of the 
machines I set up use roughly 1-2GB.

Cheers; Leon