On Friday, November 17, 2017 at 7:49:00 AM UTC-7, toront...@gmail.com wrote:
> I intend to reinstall 3.2 which is currently running on somewhat undersized 
> SSD. This time I would like to keep most of the semi-static portions of the 
> OS and templates on the SSD for speed and to reduce wear on the SSD and the 
> more dynamic parts on a spinning disk. If this were a conventional Linux 
> distro, I would put /tmp, /var, /home in separate partitions on the spinner 
> and the rest on the SSD. I would tend to put swap on the spinner also because 
> with the amount of memory in this box, I do not expect swap to be used much, 
> if at all and would rather wast space on the disk than the SSD.
> 
> The problem is that the more I think about it, the more convinced I have 
> become that I do not actually understand the file system structure in Qubes 
> OS.
> 
> I have done some keyword searches here but have not found what I need. I 
> would appreciate any pointers as to where I could find this info or if it is 
> compact, a list of what to put where would be great. I am fully comfortable 
> with fdisk so I do not need help with the partitioning itself, unless there 
> is some unusual gotchas in Qubes.
> 
> I think I need to still put /tmp and /Var on the disk but I think I 
> understand that the /home for each of the VMs actually reside in /var but I 
> do not know what is happening with /tmp.
> 
> Thank you in advance.

I did this when I installed 3.2, but with a tweak to what's described in the 
docs: rather than symlinks (which it says break the backups), I used the 
existing directory as a mountpoint. I have some detailed notes I've meant to 
write up properly. I'll see if I can get them pasted in here later. But 
basically I:

1. Installed QubesOS normally, using just the SSD (with a tiny swap space, just 
to stop Qubes from complaining every boot, but that's optional). 

2. Set up two hard drives mirrored with mdraid, and encrypted with LUKS.

3. Manually decrypted and mounted the drive (the two drives are seen as one md0 
drive) to a temporary mount point.

4. Ensured all appvms were shutdown, and moved all of them to the new drive 
(these were the only ones I was really worried about; the rest I can get with a 
reinstall).

5. Unmounted md0 and remounted it on top of the old appvms directory.

6. Tested that everything worked as expected (appvms startup, function, and 
shutdown properly).

7. Edited fstab, crypttab, and mdadm.conf to ensure these get mounted during 
boot.

8. Rebooted, and all was good. A few more steps, but no symlinks, appvms all on 
a separate, encrypted, mirrored drive. A nice little feature too is that since 
I used the same passphrase for md0 as for the SSD, it only prompts once for 
them during boot.

Ron

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