On Sun, 2004-08-01 at 07:12, David L Norris wrote: > > > > > Much of this depends on what you plan to use the system for. For a true > > multi-user server using different mount points for various directories > > is a good idea as it can prevent the server from dying if one of the > > less critical partitions are filled up for some reason. (usually a user > > that generates tones of files for some reason causing / to fill up and > > halt the system.) > > Users can't completely fill a filesystem; only root can fill a > filesystem. A portion (by default 10%) of each partition is reserved > for the system. Users may be able to cause some services to complain > but the system itself should remain fairly operational. > Very true. It is funny seeing a file system at 105% of full. :) But things like sendmail and apache can grind to a halt since they should be run as non root users. Much of this depends on what the system is being designed for, as stated previously. > > For a single user system IMHO this is not as important. You can always > > backup the /home directory if you are doing an upgrade or re-install. > > So for a workstation I normally setup a /boot, swap, and / file systems > > with the bulk of the space in the / file system. > > I always keep /home on its own disk(s). This way it is completely > independent of the operating system itself. > Good idea if you have the drives. > > For a personal workstation put everything under /. It will save you > > lots of headaches when you find that you guessed wrong and need a much > > larger /usr file system since you installed so many packages. > > Yep. > > > How much memory do you have on your system? Normally they recommend > > swap be twice what your memory is. I usually consider 1GB for swap the > > most you should ever really need regardless of how much memory you > > have. If you find you are using a lot of swap space then you probably > > need more memory > > Depends on what you're doing. Swap isn't all bad. Running out of > physical RAM is very bad and some uses of swap can prevent that. More > RAM is better but increasing the swap can be quite adequate for some > things. > > For example, VMWare can benefit greatly by setting its temp directory > to /dev/shm, increasing the size of /dev/shm to 1 GB or more and adding > enough swap space to compensate. It seems to prevent many unexplained > guest OS lockups and other problems. > < http://www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=844 > > Good points. I have not had any reason to run VMWare. :) (that always seemed to be a novelty, not a serious solution for anything.) > > Not sure having /usr as a separate file system will really save you > > anything during a reinstall. If I was reinstalling /usr is probably one > > of the file systems I would want to replace completely. Again if it was > > a multiuser system a separate /usr makes some sense. > > I don't think mounting /usr separately makes any sense on a standalone > system nor any RPM-based system. It might have made more sense in the > past on some systems, I guess. I've tried running standalone systems > this way and it typically does nothing but waste disk space. > > > Excellent question! I can not think of any reason you should not be > > able to use the same swap space for two different install of linux as > > long as they both are not trying to use it at the same time. > > Sharing swap will work fine. And, the installer should automatically > detect and setup all the available swap partitions. -- Scot L. Harris webid@xxxxxxxxxx If you're not very clever you should be conciliatory. -- Benjamin Disraeli
