Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup?
On 7/29/2020 11:38 AM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
As for partition sizing, I set up my machines with three partitions:
/, /home, and swap.
I don't implement a separate partition for /home. Instead, I place it
on my data array where it gets backed up nightly, then a create a
symlink to /RAID/home from the root directory. That way, the user's
files can grow to be as gargantuan as they like, they have protected
backups, and I don't have to worry about upgrades.
If you're going to be installing lots of software
on your machine (especially games), I'd recommend setting aside 20 or
30 gigabytes for /, since /usr can get pretty large. I learned this
the hard way after getting caught behind the 8-ball after a kernel
upgrade. Fortunately, gparted came to the rescue, allowing me to
shave 10GB off /home and give it to /. I use the old rule of thumb
of twice memory size for swap, and give what's left to /home.
By moving /home to the data array, I leave plenty of breathing space
for /. Since I am using SSDs for booting, I get a little generous and
use 40GB total of swap - 20G from each drive - with 16G of memory. I
allocate a generous 200M of space to a /boot partition on each drive
assembled into a RAID 1 array formatted as ext2. Since /boot almost
never gets written, there is no need for journalling. That leaves a
full 98G for / on a pair of 128G SSDs. These can be had for as little
as $18 each, these days.
You definitely want /home in its own partition - it makes life
much easier when doing upgrades, since you can completely wipe
out / while leaving /home intact. (Needless to say, though, I
back up /home regularly, plus /etc and /usr for good measure.)
I agree /home is best kept separate from /, but I disagree it is better
to give it it's own partition on a NAS or file server. I agree it is a
good idea on a workstation or an embedded system, where all of the
partitions may be somewhat limited, and in particular where there may be
only a single hard drive or a single set of array spindles. On a NAS or
file server, however, the data repository needs to be huge, and given
that /home is a lot more volatile than /, or especially /boot, I think
putting /home on the data repository is a better idea. After all, why
limit its size while simultaneously eating up space that some day might
be needed by /? That, plus the drive(s) used by the boot system will
likely last a lot longer if not subjected to the thrashing inherent in
the /home directories.
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