[klug] Advice for computer disk partitions...

[Hoopy Frood]

One thing I will point out about shared space on a
Fat32 (msdos) partition is that you will lose
permissions on those devices.

Here is some advice on how to best mout shared
devices:

If your primary use for the drive is to move large
content files (such as images, movies, source code,
etc...) for only one user then use the mount options
in fstab for uid= and gid= to set ownership of the
files on the drive and modelines on the files
specifically for your principle user.

If the drive will be used by multiple users and you
wish to preserve ownership and permissions on the
files between users then you might want to consider
using an ext2 partition.  There are some excellent
tools for mounting ext2 partitions under windows. 
This is a rather unusual use for many people, but I
have found it to be very useful for keeping secure
information (gnupg keys and ssh public/private keys)
on a portable usb key between windows, linux and mac
os operating systems (although Tiger broke ext2fs on
the mac and it has yet to be fixed as of the time of
this letter).

On partitions, I highly suggest the following:

A 50-100Mb /boot partition.  Having a separate boot
partition is a VERY good idea as it will allow you to
safely repair it and format it without affecting your
system.  It will also allow you to insulate your
kernel from malicious programs by leaving that
partition unmounted during normal operations.

At least 2GB reserved for /, much more if you do not
plan on having the following partitions as well.

Most of your space should be devided between your /usr
partition and your /home partition.  Your /home
partition is going to be your storage location for
large files but if  you need more room then you can
always make a user directory in /usr/share, give
yourself read/write permissions and then symlink it to
something like ~/datadir.  

I must very highly recommend that you have a separate
/home partition.  A separate home partition will allow
you to have multiple linux versions installed while
sharing all of your preferences between them by
sharing a home partition.  If you manage your uid/gid
settings correctly then you can boot into your choice
of distribution without having to synchronize settings
between them for your principle user.  I once set up a
machine with Gentoo, Redhat, Suse, Slackware and
FreeBSD using an ext2 home parition between all of
them seemlessly.

Make sure that you leave at least 500Mb available to
your /var directory or partition.  You might get
improved performance from having a separate /var
partition on a separate volume from your root
partition if you have enough disks for the task.  The
/var partition is used by linux for writing all of
your logs to disk, including the syslog and for most
disk-enabled application swapping and to-disk mapping.
 (mmap usually uses memory based mapping but can also
use disk based memory mapping for
large/memory-intensive applicaions).

Just my $0.02.

--- Ernie Fulton <ernie.fulton at gmail.com> wrote:

> One note about these silly large drives is the fat32
> size restriction
> for the shared space. I think the largest a fat32
> partition can be is
> ~37 GB. I could be wrong. So you might want to keep
> that in mind. For
> instance, Large movie project files that will never
> be needed in Linux
> is best kept in ntfs. But a 30 GB partition to share
> mp3 files and
> bookmarks is best kept in fat32.
> 
> I would suggest having at least a seperate /, home,
> tmp, and var
> partitions. That way if a log gets too big it won't
> eat up the /
> partition and preventing any disk writes. Also if
> your home area is
> seperate you can save your files if you decide to
> change/upgrade
> distros later.
> 
> I would suggest David's approach over just one /
> partition. With full
> installs of the latest Linux distrobutions I have
> not seem more than 6
> GB used in /usr.
> 
> I ran just a / and swap partition scheme on my last
> laptop after I got
> tired of the multiple partion scheme and a log
> filled up on a stray
> apache process and I lost all the files I had open
> because I had not
> saved them and could not. I had a similar issue
> happen when gimp
> filled up tmp.
> 
> Anyway I would just add to David's post with:
> 
> Partition 8 (type: swap, size: == RAM)
> 
> On 6/22/05, Jeremy Brown <jeremy at brownjava.org>
> wrote:
> > I generally stick all my Linux stuff in a single
> partition mounted at "/"
> > when installing to a PC or laptop.  This may be
> the "wrong" way to do it,
> > but it has always seemed a hell of a lot simpler. 
> And it keeps you from
> > running out of space in "/usr" or "/home" or
> something.  Servers may be a
> > different situation though.  I think there's also
> some older hardware that
> > can't boot unless "/boot" is physically located as
> the first partition
> > (this has just never been a problem for me).
> > 
> > Jeremy
> > 
> > > Joseph Tipton wrote:
> > >> 1)  NTFS for the WinXP OS
> > >> 2)  FAT32 for storage of my personal files to
> be accessed by both XP and
> > >> Linux
> > >> 3)  EXT3 (sp?)  for the Linux OS (plus a SWAP
> partition, I assume)
> > >>
> > >> Any suggestions on the sizes for these
> partitions?  In reality my use
> > >> of Linux will be light until I gain more
> familiarity and confidence
> > >> with it.
> > >
> > > Hi Joseph,
> > >   Everyone has their own preference as to how to
> partition a disk, but
> > > here is my two cents:
> > >
> > > Partition1: /boot (type: ext3 size: 128mb)
> > > Partition2: Windows (type: ntfs size: 10240mb)
> > > Partition3: Shared (type: fat32 size: 20480mb)
> > > Partition4: /var (type: ext3 size: 2048mb)
> > > Partition5: /tmp (type: ext3 size: 1024mb)
> > > Partition6: /usr (type: ext3 size: 10240mb)
> > > Partition7: / (type: ext3 size: 2048mb)
> > >
> > > One caveat when I tried to have a shared fat32
> partition between windows
> > > and linux is when mounting the fat32 partition
> in linux, all permissions
> > > are disregarded.  So all of the files are owned
> by whoever mounts that
> > > partition.  You can play around with options of
> mount to get it to use
> > > your user's permissions.
> > >
> > > Make the /boot partition the bootable partition,
> and install grub on
> > > that one.  You can then use grub's chainloader
> option to dual boot into
> > > windows.
> > >
> > > Those are my minimum recommended sizes for what
> you want to do, increase
> > > partitions like Shared, /usr, and Windows
> depending on what you plan on
> > > doing with the computer.
> > >
> > > -dave
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > KLUG mailing list
> > > KLUG at cs.utk.edu
> > > http://lists.cs.utk.edu/listinfo/klug
> > >
> > 
> > 
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