Hi Chuck, thanks for responding.
... For what it's worth, I'd rather have two 80GB drives in a RAID-1 mirror than have my stuff on two seperate drives, but using software RAID like vinum/gvinum, you can still mirror 80GB onto the 200GB drive, and have an additional 120 GB of space left over.
That does sound like a good idea, especially if it's something I can introduce at a later stage.
[ You don't have to do anything about that now, if you do leave an 80 GB chunk of space uncommitted on the big disk. ]
By uncommitted do you mean space that I keep completed unallocated or can it be space in which, following Jeremy's suggestion, I create a temporary file system that I keep empty until I learn how to use vinum/gvinum?
Thanks,
Donnacha
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Server purpose: Initially just forums, later sundry other Web apps i.e. ecommerce, ticket bookings etc. Will possibly become a heavy-duty email server at some stage.
2GB RAM
80GB HDD IDE: / = 1GB /usr = 15GB /local = 15GB Swap = 4GB Unallocated = 40GB
200GB HDD IDE:
/tmp = 2GB (is that enough?) /home = 28GB /var = 100GB (will inclube the forum databases etc) Unallocated = 70GB
I'll be asking them to put the both disks in dangerously dedicated mode, with each on a different IDE bus.
Don't use "dangerously dedicated mode" for your boot drive. Reserving the 63 sectors at the beginning for a MBR-style layout is a trivial waste of space compared with the hassle of not being able to boot from the drive
Is it a good idea leaving so much unallocated space? My research suggests that this may be useful for moving directories around or giving specific subdirectories their own partition at a later date when I have a better idea of usage, does that sound right?
Yes, it's a good idea. There is nothing wrong with configuring all of the space to be used if you want to do so and you know what the usage and growth are going to be. However, if you are not certain about how various filesystems grow, there is a real advantage to having some unallocated space handy.
The only problem about creating partitions at a later date is that I will have command line access only, I'm not even sure if I can create partitions at a later date, I think that for sysinstall I might actually have to be there. Can anyone advise me on this?
You can run /stand/sysinstall remotely via the command line, if you like.
Either way, you can adjust the partition table and create new filesystems later on without a problem.
Swap: As the second disk will have the presumably quite busy /tmp and /var, placing all the swap on this the first disk, rather than shared between both, could help to balance the load a bit (thanks to Henry Miller for that suggestion). With 2GB of RAM, I'm hoping the Swap won't be needed very often anyway; if it is, I may simply add more memory.
You want to have your swap partition be a little larger than the amount of RAM you have; use 2.5 or 3 GB for swap.
The biggest problem I see with your layout about is that you don't have a complete bootable system on just the 80 GB drive. If you start moving disks around between machines, for some reason (whether it's to add another box to split the workload, or because one of the drives is showing failure signs and needs to be replaced), you may really regret doing so.
I'd be happier with:
80GB HD: / 1 GB swap 3 GB /tmp 6 GB /var 20 GB /usr 20 GB /home? 30 GB maybe, or might leave unused
Do this as two FDISK partitions, the first with a bootable system via BSd partition slices, the second as /home or unused.
200GB HD:
unused 80 GB reserved at beginning of disk, either for possible mirror or as needed for another filesystem based on growth
swap 3 GB (optional, could be put in the 80 GB slice above)
/local 40 GB I'd call this /opt, myself :-)
/home? 40 GB maybe I'd put /home here, and not on the 80 GB
unused 40 GB for a while until you see which filesystems grow and/or to balance disk utilization...
Do this as 4 FDISK partitions.
The thing is, 20 GB will still fit a ton of stuff in /var. When it starts getting full, take your biggest database or the forums or whatever, and move it to it's own partition using the 30 or 40 GB of space left uncommitted, and use a symlink so the old path still works...
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