On Saturday 30 November 2002 10:15 pm, Brady Hegberg wrote:
> I mainly have experience with setting up webservers and the Redhat
> default server partition setup is pretty good for that but I've had
> trouble with a couple things:
>
> 1.  Redhat makes /var very small which isn't so bad except a few apps
> like to put their data in /var (like mySQL and Apache.)  So if you want
> to leave those in the default places I'd give /var at least a couple
> gigs.

Another big one people sometimes forget about is /var/spool/  If you are 
running a server that does spooling (mail, print, etc) make sure you have 
enough space there to handle a big influx.  I found a 500Mb partition for 
/var isnt enough if you have 4 people consistantly using the same box to 
print. You will eventully run out of space.

> 2.  Even if you make /var big enough eventually something will happen
> that will make one of your log files go crazy and fill up your entire
> /var partition which will kill any applications (mySQL) that use it to
> store data.  So I'd think seriously about giving /var/log it's own
> partition off someplace where it can't take any other processes down
> with it.

Its best to know what sort of things you are running, and what you need to 
have logged.  We generate close to 300Mb of logs per server per day, and need 
to keep a weeks worth of logs. Knowing that info helps a lot.  

> I'd be interested to know how other people handle this stuff.  I suppose
> a production database should usually run on it's own partition but it
> seems like overkill when the database is 5MB and not growing.

We got to the point where we watch all of our servers very closely, and all 
have large hard drives (60+Gb) that have good raid's- making installing much 
easer because we just use a single partition. This is not a good solution for 
everyone, and it depends on the server. We do this to our web servers, where 
the performance difference is almost nill for us, and we have everything 
loadbalanced, so the value of the data on a single drive isnt worth much to 
us.


> > Can someone please give me some advice partitioning a Red Hat 8.0
> > install?
> > I have a 60Gig hard drive and want to do a server install.
> > EventuallyI want to add VMWare for several Windows versions.  I am
> > confused as to the amount of space and how many partitions.

Think about the size of the virtual drives you want for windows, and how many 
different install's you want.  VMWare is good in that a 2Gb disk image dosnt 
take up 2Gb until the drive is full- but you need to make sure you have 
enough space to place all of these. My workstation has 3 VMWare sessions, 
each with a 4G drive. I keep them all in my home directory, and /home is on a 
15Gb partition. Should be enough for me.

-- 
Jay Kline
http://www.slushpupie.com