Partition Advice with Debian / Linode 80

I just put it all on 1 partition, not the optimum way but i'm lazy :) and it's not mission critical server.

I wasn't sure about this when I started out. I installed the Logical Volume Manager so I could change my allocations as I got to know what was needed.

I have a Linode 80 with the extra 50% disk space for annual payment deal.

Here's what I currently have:

peter@fremont ~ $ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/ubd/0            193M   96M   98M  50% /
/dev/vg0/lv_var       768M  364M  405M  48% /var
/dev/vg0/lv_usr       1.7G  1.4G  332M  81% /usr
/dev/vg0/lv_opt       256M  215M   42M  84% /opt
/dev/vg0/lv_home      512M  256M  257M  50% /home
/dev/vg0/lv_tmp       128M   33M   96M  26% /tmp
none                   37M     0   37M   0% /dev/shm
peter@fremont ~ $ 

/opt only has Java stuff in it for testing.

/usr is getting a bit too full but I have around 350 MiB not allocated yet. Also, this Linode runs Gentoo, so the portage tree takes up ~400 MiB and I seem to have three sets of kernel source in there, left over from some long-forgotten experiment. Must have a clean out. With Debian and not keeping a lot of crap here, you could cut it down by 800 MiB.

/var contains a lot of rotated mail and apache logs - it could be greatly reduced in size if I kept them elsewhere.

I also have a 256 MiB swap partition and a 192 MiB Debian partition for tinkering with / repairing the Gentoo setup.

My suggestion for your 3072 MiB:

/            128
home         512
opt          256
swap         256
tmp          128
usr         1024
var          640
emergency    128

total       3072

If you don't need /opt, distribute it between /home and /usr, taking into account whether you expect more user data or more software.

If you can be bothered to figure it out, LVM is great because you can change your mind later on. I guess caker's image resize tool is a good substitute, although you have to shut down to use it.

hth

I'm a newbie to Linux and VPSes.

Peter, I know this is an old post and that your setup has possibly changed since your post here, but I'm interested in what you have listed and have a few questions.

1. What is/was the purpose of the separate /usr partition/image?

2. You said that if a person doesn't need /opt, they don't need to separate it out. For what would it be needed as a separate partition/image?

3. What kinds of things do you find yourself storing in /home? Most people simply say "personal files." As someone who only wants to run a web server, I'm wondering what kinds of things I'd be storing in /home.

4. What was the purpose of the "emergency" partition/image you recommended?

5. Where do you store your website files?

Of course, I'd be interested in hearing responses from others on these same questions as well.

That is indeed an old post and much has changed. My Linode 80 is all grown up into a Linode 512 now, but it is still running the same filesystem layout. For newer machines, I have abandoned Logical Volume Manager so that I can use the Linode backup system. Here's a more up-to-date layout:

/dev/xvda    2.0G    /
/dev/xvdb    256M    swap
/dev/xvdc    4.0G    /srv
/dev/xvdd    2.0G    /var
/dev/xvde    1.0G    /var/log
/dev/xvdf    24G     /vmail

You can see that I have abandoned a lot of the separate partitions that I used to have – experience has shown them to be unnecessary. I would still use a separate '/home' if there were a lot of 'real' users on the machine, to make it easier to preserve the data across system rebuilds, but this machine has only virtual mail users and a few admins -- hence the big '/vmail' partition. I keep a separate '/var/log' partition because it makes it easier to see when a problem is filling up the logs and reduces the problems that occur if a process goes mad and fills the log partition right up. The separate '/srv' and 'var' partitions are a personal preference -- we are moving a lot of stuff here from other servers and I resize them as we figure out what space we need. When we are done, I will allocate the unused space to vmail.

@Kyle:

1. What is/was the purpose of the separate /usr partition/image?
Experience has shown this to be unnecessary.

@Kyle:

2. You said that if a person doesn't need /opt, they don't need to separate it out. For what would it be needed as a separate partition/image?
See [1]

@Kyle:

3. What kinds of things do you find yourself storing in /home? Most people simply say "personal files." As someone who only wants to run a web server, I'm wondering what kinds of things I'd be storing in /home.
Nothing, apart from a few SSH certificates for connecting to other VPSs.

@Kyle:

4. What was the purpose of the "emergency" partition/image you recommended?
I used to keep a minimalist Debian distro installed for maintenance if I really broke the main install. Now, I use the Finnix recovery facility provided by Linode.

@Kyle:

5. Where do you store your website files?
Stuff that I create, I put in '/srv/www/websitename'. Things that the package manager installs (e.g. squirrelmail, postfixadmin, munin, aegir, drupal), I leave where they are ('/var/whatever', '/usr/share/whatever', etc.) and link to them from '/srv/www' if necessary.