[gentoo-user] partition sizes and home directories

[gentoo-user] partition sizes and home directories

[sean]

I know this can be a tough call on how to partition a drive, but I am 
looking for some input.

My system will be used as for my own personal use, no server for 
outside, though I may run a web server for private in home use, some 
games, whatever I wish to play and experiment.

Users, mainly just me, and perhaps a family member or three.
Here is what I quickly setup.

$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3             471M  271M  176M  61% /
udev                 1004M  208K 1004M   1% /dev
/dev/hda1              38M  2.6M   34M   8% /boot
/dev/hda5             4.6G  185M  4.2G   5% /var
/dev/hda6              31G  2.3G   27G   8% /usr
shm                  1004M     0 1004M   0% /dev/shm

What caught me off guard was that fact that /home is located under / and 
that is where my user profiles are being set, instead of /usr/home like 
it is on my freebsd system.
When I copied over my personal files, it quickly filled up the / 
partition, which I have since deleted.
Now I noticed that there is a /usr/home, what exactly is that used for, 
since users are not there by default?

I would figure /boot does not really change much in size, leave as is, 
maybe shrink a few mb.
/var, up and down, perhaps bring it down a gig, gig and a half.
/usr, would grow depending on software installs, much as possible. I 
have not installed much currently.
If /home was on its own, I am guessing that the current / allocation 
would be fine?
Anyone confirm?
Now I just have to figure what I want /home to be, or perhaps could the 
default setup for users be located in /usr/home?
Would this cause problems?
Is it non standard?

					Thanks
					Sean
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Re: [gentoo-user] partition sizes and home directories

[John Jolet]

On Tuesday 25 October 2005 04:44, sean wrote:
> I know this can be a tough call on how to partition a drive, but I am
> looking for some input.
>
> My system will be used as for my own personal use, no server for
> outside, though I may run a web server for private in home use, some
> games, whatever I wish to play and experiment.
If you think you might do re-installs, put /home on a seperate partition, 
otherwise I normally just have /boot and /.
>
> Users, mainly just me, and perhaps a family member or three.
> Here is what I quickly setup.
>
> $ df -h
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda3             471M  271M  176M  61% /
> udev                 1004M  208K 1004M   1% /dev
> /dev/hda1              38M  2.6M   34M   8% /boot
> /dev/hda5             4.6G  185M  4.2G   5% /var
> /dev/hda6              31G  2.3G   27G   8% /usr
> shm                  1004M     0 1004M   0% /dev/shm
>
> What caught me off guard was that fact that /home is located under / and
> that is where my user profiles are being set, instead of /usr/home like
> it is on my freebsd system.
> When I copied over my personal files, it quickly filled up the /
> partition, which I have since deleted.
> Now I noticed that there is a /usr/home, what exactly is that used for,
> since users are not there by default?
>
> I would figure /boot does not really change much in size, leave as is,
> maybe shrink a few mb.
> /var, up and down, perhaps bring it down a gig, gig and a half.
> /usr, would grow depending on software installs, much as possible. I
> have not installed much currently.
> If /home was on its own, I am guessing that the current / allocation
> would be fine?
> Anyone confirm?
> Now I just have to figure what I want /home to be, or perhaps could the
> default setup for users be located in /usr/home?
> Would this cause problems?
> Is it non standard?
>
> 					Thanks
> 					Sean

-- 
John Jolet
Your On-Demand IT Department
512-762-0729
www.jolet.net
john@jolet.net
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Re: [gentoo-user] partition sizes and home directories

[Digby Tarvin]

I would strongly recomend putting the home directory on its own
partition. It then doesn't matter too much where you decide to mount
it, although some broken applications may assume the Linux convention
of using /home, so it is probably safest to preserve this and use a
sym link if you want to be able to use the /usr/home you are familiar
with.

Always keep the root partition small and relatively stable, since it
is minimal platform from which the rest of the system can be recovered.

I keep mine to about 20M, so I don't need to keep a separate /boot
partition. /tmp is a sym link to /var/tmp, so that in secure mode
/var and /home are the only two filesystems that should need to be
mounted read/write. The former is writeable space for the system, and the
latter for users. Other filesystem should only need to be made writeable
when modifying the sytstem if everything is configured right.

In practice there are still some annoying exceptions (like /etc/passwd
and /etc/mtab) which mean you have to do a bit more work to get the
root filesystem able to be mounted readonly, but if it is small it
doesn't take so long to back it up and fsck it after a crash, so
it is probably only worth worrying about it for a secure system.

Regards,
DigbyT

On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 09:44:23AM +0000, sean wrote:
> I know this can be a tough call on how to partition a drive, but I am 
> looking for some input.
> 
> My system will be used as for my own personal use, no server for 
> outside, though I may run a web server for private in home use, some 
> games, whatever I wish to play and experiment.
> 
> Users, mainly just me, and perhaps a family member or three.
> Here is what I quickly setup.
> 
> $ df -h
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda3             471M  271M  176M  61% /
> udev                 1004M  208K 1004M   1% /dev
> /dev/hda1              38M  2.6M   34M   8% /boot
> /dev/hda5             4.6G  185M  4.2G   5% /var
> /dev/hda6              31G  2.3G   27G   8% /usr
> shm                  1004M     0 1004M   0% /dev/shm
> 
> What caught me off guard was that fact that /home is located under / and 
> that is where my user profiles are being set, instead of /usr/home like 
> it is on my freebsd system.
> When I copied over my personal files, it quickly filled up the / 
> partition, which I have since deleted.
> Now I noticed that there is a /usr/home, what exactly is that used for, 
> since users are not there by default?
> 
> I would figure /boot does not really change much in size, leave as is, 
> maybe shrink a few mb.
> /var, up and down, perhaps bring it down a gig, gig and a half.
> /usr, would grow depending on software installs, much as possible. I 
> have not installed much currently.
> If /home was on its own, I am guessing that the current / allocation 
> would be fine?
> Anyone confirm?
> Now I just have to figure what I want /home to be, or perhaps could the 
> default setup for users be located in /usr/home?
> Would this cause problems?
> Is it non standard?
> 
> 					Thanks
> 					Sean
> -- 
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

-- 
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                             digbyt@digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com
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Re: [gentoo-user] partition sizes and home directories

[Richard Fish]

sean wrote:

> I know this can be a tough call on how to partition a drive, but I am 
> looking for some input.
>
> My system will be used as for my own personal use, no server for 
> outside, though I may run a web server for private in home use, some 
> games, whatever I wish to play and experiment.
>
> Users, mainly just me, and perhaps a family member or three.
> Here is what I quickly setup.
>
> $ df -h
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda3             471M  271M  176M  61% /
> udev                 1004M  208K 1004M   1% /dev
> /dev/hda1              38M  2.6M   34M   8% /boot
> /dev/hda5             4.6G  185M  4.2G   5% /var
> /dev/hda6              31G  2.3G   27G   8% /usr
> shm                  1004M     0 1004M   0% /dev/shm


Here is my filesystem setup, that has been working pretty well (the 
device names are because I use LVM):

carcharias rjf # df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/sys-root  4.9G  2.3G  2.4G  50% /
/dev/hda1              99M   17M   78M  18% /boot
/dev/mapper/sys-tmp   2.0G   67M  1.8G   4% /tmp
/dev/mapper/sys-var   4.9G  576M  4.1G  13% /var
/dev/mapper/sys-home   59G   34G   22G  61% /home
/dev/mapper/sys-opt   2.0G  380M  1.5G  21% /opt
/dev/mapper/sys-local
                      992M  166M  776M  18% /usr/local
/dev/mapper/sys-portage
                      992M  563M  379M  60% /usr/portage
/dev/mapper/sys-distfiles
                      3.9G  2.4G  1.4G  64% /usr/portage/distfiles
/dev/mapper/sys-packages
                      4.0G  129M  3.6G   4% /usr/portage/packages
/dev/mapper/sys-share
                      3.9G  1.4G  2.4G  37% /usr/share
/dev/mapper/sys-src   2.0G  823M  1.1G  44% /usr/src


> What caught me off guard was that fact that /home is located under / 
> and that is where my user profiles are being set, instead of /usr/home 
> like it is on my freebsd system.
> When I copied over my personal files, it quickly filled up the / 
> partition, which I have since deleted.
> Now I noticed that there is a /usr/home, what exactly is that used 
> for, since users are not there by default?


No /usr/home on my system.  My guess is that it is an artifact from your 
FreeBSD system.

>
> I would figure /boot does not really change much in size, leave as is, 
> maybe shrink a few mb.
> /var, up and down, perhaps bring it down a gig, gig and a half.


PORTAGE_TMPDIR defaults to /var/tmp, which means any builds will occur 
in /var.  Beware that some builds require a large amount of disk space 
to complete.  For example, building OpenOffice 2.0 on my system consumed 
something like 3G of tmp space.  So if you shrink it, you should 
consider changing PORTAGE_TMPDIR in /etc/make.conf, or there may be 
times where you have to run "PORTAGE_TMPDIR=/path/to/more/space emerge 
<big package>"

> Now I just have to figure what I want /home to be, or perhaps could 
> the default setup for users be located in /usr/home?
> Would this cause problems?
> Is it non standard?


Yes, it is non-standard, but still possible.  You just have to specify 
the home directory to adduser with the -b option.

In any case, I highly recommend checking out LVM, and leave some space 
available on your disk(s), as it will allow you to easily grow things 
later if you run out of space somewhere.

Cheers,
-Richard

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Re: [gentoo-user] partition sizes and home directories

[Iain Buchanan]

On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 09:44 +0000, sean wrote:
> I know this can be a tough call on how to partition a drive, but I am 
> looking for some input.
> 
> My system will be used as for my own personal use, no server for 
> outside, though I may run a web server for private in home use, some 
> games, whatever I wish to play and experiment.

The most simple and effective partition setup for a basic install is
just boot-root-swap!  ie, a /boot partition, a / and some swapspace.
Everything else can hang off there.

If however, you're like me and you have lots of user downloaded stuff, I
would consider either an extra /home partition, or an ftp shared
directory where all your vids / music / games / bug stuff can go.

> Users, mainly just me, and perhaps a family member or three.
> Here is what I quickly setup.
> 
> $ df -h
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda3             471M  271M  176M  61% /
> udev                 1004M  208K 1004M   1% /dev
> /dev/hda1              38M  2.6M   34M   8% /boot
> /dev/hda5             4.6G  185M  4.2G   5% /var
> /dev/hda6              31G  2.3G   27G   8% /usr
> shm                  1004M     0 1004M   0% /dev/shm

personally I wouldn't bother with usr and var, but many people will
disagree.

> What caught me off guard was that fact that /home is located under / and 
> that is where my user profiles are being set, instead of /usr/home like 
> it is on my freebsd system.
> When I copied over my personal files, it quickly filled up the / 
> partition, which I have since deleted.

*lol* You've since deleted the / partition?  How is that working for
you?!!

> Now I noticed that there is a /usr/home, what exactly is that used for, 
> since users are not there by default?

you probably made it by mistake when copying stuff from your freebsd
machine.

> I would figure /boot does not really change much in size, leave as is, 
> maybe shrink a few mb.

I couldn't see a /boot in your `df -h` list, probably because it wasn't
mounted.  I've never needed a /boot larger than 100Mb, and I'm
constantly recompiling kernels, with a few old versions lying around
in /boot just in case.

> /var, up and down, perhaps bring it down a gig, gig and a half.
> /usr, would grow depending on software installs, much as possible. I 
> have not installed much currently.

remember /usr/portage.  This can potentially hog a lot of space.  I have
a final partition (ok I lied about only having boot-root-swap :) mounted
as /home/ftp/pub/gentoo, which is mounted again as /usr/portage.  This
lets me share my distfiles with others, as well as keeping the size
of /usr down.

> If /home was on its own, I am guessing that the current / allocation 
> would be fine?
> Anyone confirm?

If you want to keep / small, then don't forget about /opt.  Quite a few
(but getting fewer and fewer) large apps install themselves there.

ATM in /opt I have enemy-territory, quake 3, blackdown jdk and jre,
vmware, and acrobat 7, as well as some others, totalling 1.1Gb!!

> Now I just have to figure what I want /home to be, or perhaps could the 
> default setup for users be located in /usr/home?
> Would this cause problems?

possibly

> Is it non standard?

What standard?  The everybody-else-does-it standard, or the LFS
standard??!!
-- 
Iain Buchanan <iaindb@netspace.net.au>

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Re: [gentoo-user] partition sizes and home directories

[A. Khattri]

On Wed, 26 Oct 2005, Iain Buchanan wrote:

> I couldn't see a /boot in your `df -h` list, probably because it wasn't
> mounted.  I've never needed a /boot larger than 100Mb, and I'm
> constantly recompiling kernels, with a few old versions lying around
> in /boot just in case.

Id make /boot 50Mb.


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