[TriLUG] Assistance with Partition Sizes on New RH 9 Installation

[Magnus]

On Monday, August 25, 2003, at 10:15  PM, Scot Huntsberry wrote:

> I am going to reinstall RH 9 tomorrow because my system has gotten so
> slow that it is ridiculous.  I was wondering if I could get some
> suggestions oh how to best partition a 50gb hard drive to maximize the
> efficiency of the system.  I would really appreciate any suggestions 
> the
> group could provide.

First, embrace the Logical Volume Manager (LVM).  It really cuts down 
on all the second guessing about HDD capacity.

Is this machine just going to be a desktop?  If so, try something like:

/dev/hda1 - /boot - ext3 - 100M - force to be primary
/dev/hda2 - vg00 - LVM - remainder of space
/dev/vg00/root - / - ext3 - 500M
/dev/vg00/swap - [swap] - 2G
/dev/vg00/tmp - /tmp - ext3 - 256M
/dev/vg00/var - /var - ext3 - 500M
/dev/vg00/usr - /usr - ext3 - 4G
/dev/vg00/home - /home - ext3 - 4G

This is largely based on what I've tuned my own system to use.  I 
started out with a smaller /usr but after compiling a couple of new 
kernels I had to grow the space some.

You'll notice there is a *lot* of unallocated space in the LVM.  This 
is a good thing.  If you ever need more space anywhere, drop to single 
user and run a command like:

	umount /home
	e2fsadm -L+1G /dev/vg00/home   # Pay close attention to the syntax 
here, and don't miss the "+" sign
	mount /home

And after a couple of minutes your /home filesystem will have grown by 
1G.  You can do this with any other filesystem as well, as-needed.

Now the real beauty of this comes in when you fill up that 50G drive 
(nobody ever believes that they will fill up that giant new drive they 
got but I've been around long enough to know it will happen eventually 
no matter the size of the drive).  You can slap a new 200G drive in the 
box and append it to your /dev/vg00 volume group, and then it becomes 
available for any of your logical volumes, such that /home for example 
could grow right past your 50G drive into your new 200G drive.

Backups get better, too.  Once you ditch the broken kernel in RH9 for a 
homerolled kernel (reeeeeally easy), you get to use the rest of LVM 
that doesn't work out of the box in RH9.  The feature in question is 
LVM snapshotting.  You can do something like create a temporary 
snapshot of your /var filesystem and have a downtime of about 5 seconds 
to back up your PostgreSQL database...   In reality, the backup takes 
as long as it normally would, but the database is down only long enough 
to create a snapshot of the filesystem, and then is brought back up 
again.  Meanwhile, you're backing up from the snapshot instead of the 
live filesystem.

LVM is a great help to have on your system, and doesn't take that much 
longer to set up at install-time.  Just make sure you install RH9 with 
the graphical installer because the LVM options aren't even there with 
the text mode installer.

--

C. Magnus Hedemark
http://trilug.org/~chrish
"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink 
what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not." - Mark Twain
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