Thanks for the input Magic Banana, hope I do not exasperate!
My Trisquel Desktop seems to be pretty close to hosed right now so I'm back
in Centos7. Looks like I'll be reinstalling sooner than I wanted.
> You know that LVM is not a type of filesystem, right?
Well, uh no. Sorry to be a dunce. Looking in disks right now I see partitions
'x#GB ext4' or 'x#GB LVM2 PV,' they are on the same level. I believe a
logical volume manager can grab non contiguous space on the hard drive and
maintain indexing in such a way as to create virtual contiguity.
> Is there any advantage in using ext3 instead of ext4? If you cannot answer
this question, you should choose ext4
I was looking for answers elsewhere and I mentioned this earlier:
"Is this still relevant:
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/ch3.en.html#s3.2"
'Starts with "Choose an intelligent partition scheme" ... maybe easier said
than done, or maybe that doc is older than the hills in computer years and no
one has gotten around to updating it in which case I'll probably withdraw the
question.
There it says
"it is usually better to use the ext3 file system. The reason for this is
that it is backwards compatible with ext2."
I gather backwards compatibility with ext 2 no longer important so I'll go
with ext4.
The whole idea of having separate partitions was based on reading that
document. "Any directory tree which a user has write permissions to, such as
e.g. /home, /tmp and /var/tmp/, should be on a separate partition. This
reduces the risk of a user DoS by filling up your "/" mount point and
rendering the system unusable (Note: this is not strictly true, since there
is always some space reserved for root which a normal user cannot fill), and
it also prevents hardlink attacks." That's what I have been basing my
thinking on.
So you say / is huge and /usr tiny so I will adjust.
So, hopefully narrowing down to something 'intelligent' like this:
3 GB / ........LVM...........LVM in case I run out of room and need to
expand.
8 GB /usr .....ext4..........Probably pretty generous
4 GB /var .....ext4..........Probably pretty generous
3 GB /tmp .....Ext2..........it will be cleaned up when the system boots.
3 GB /opt .....Ext4..........Probably pretty generous
2 GB swap....................25% of RAM
500 GB /home...ext4 or LVM
Well, think I'm going to try it, since my desktop is hosed anyway. Let you
know how I end up.