tlug: Partitioning sizes

[Matt Gushee <matt@example.com>]

Hi, Dave--

I imagine you know this, but the appropriate partition sizes will vary 
greatly depending on how you use the machine. But here are a few quick 
comments based on my experience.

Dave Gutteridge writes:

 > 64MB swap

You might want more, especially if you use Netscape often.

 > 256MB /

This seems absurdly large to me. You've got all the potentially
big stuff on separate partitions. I have 32MB for a root partition and
am nowhere near having it full. Hmm ... though RedHat has a /tmp
directory by default. Maybe that's why.

 > 512MB /usr 

Might not be big enough. If you compile a lot of stuff &/or do
development, you might want to double or triple this.

 > 512MB /home

?? This is just for your personal use, right? Then unless you're
doing some serious graphics or multimedia (i.e., something that makes a 
lot of huge files), I would think 1/4 to 1/2 of the above would be
plenty.

 > 256MB /var

(One note of confusion - the manual says that I should make the / partition
as big as possible,

Based on what I've read in say, the LDP manuals, this sounds like very 
bad advice to me. The argument is that the / partition is intended for 
stuff that you can't afford to lose ... so you keep it small and have
heavily-write-accessed files on other partitions to lessen the chances 
of losing this critical data.

 > Also, since a big part of this machine's purpose is to do mail services
 > (albeit only for me at this point), should I increase /var?

256 Megs might be more than you need ... but how much mail do you get?

Hope this helps a little,

Matt Gushee
Oshamanbe, Hokkaido

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