Partitioning scheme

[Capo]

One thing I was a little surprised at is the fact that my Debian server was partitioned with only boot, swap, proc and root.

Is there a way to do a non-destructive partition on the free space in root? And if there is, could I concievably move var, usr and home from root to those new partitions without borking the system.

And by all means if there is a reasoning for this scheme, I'm curious:D

[knightfoo]

Originally posted by Capo
One thing I was a little surprised at is the fact that my Debian server was partitioned with only boot, swap, proc and root.

Is there a way to do a non-destructive partition on the free space in root? And if there is, could I concievably move var, usr and home from root to those new partitions without borking the system.

It's possible, just not advisable. You should be able to use parted (in theory) to resize the root partition .. of course after you shut down all of your system daemons and remount the / partition read-only.

And by all means if there is a reasoning for this scheme, I'm curious:D

Simplicity. Since there are so many uses for dedicated Linux servers, it would be impossible to make a partitioning scheme aside from boot/root/swap that would work for everyone with minimal hassle.

-knightfoo

[Capo]

Yeah I thought some more about it after my post last night, and figured out that I could in fact backup root, unmount it, resize it, restore it, and create the new logical partitions......it's more of a question of "do I want to".

As it stands right now, I don't have the "need" to do it, it would be more of a building it that way for the future type of thing.

My thinking about partitions is this: If you're running a webserver, with all the goodies, it would be advantageous to separate things like /var, /usr and /home to prevent corruption, make it esier to manage backups....yadda, yadda, yadda.

I suppose if this were to end up being a machine that just manages the domains I own, it may not be a big deal to leave it as is. But if I end up reselling some of it I should have my duck's in a row.

decisions....decisions;)

[Capo]

Would it be an acceptable use of a move-in ticket to have support partition it to my needs for me? I'm at a point right now where it doesn't matter if I lose any data, as all I've been doing is installing packages, trying things out.

Before I get too deep in configuration, It would be nice to have the slate clean with the partitioning scheme for my needs (think future cPanel release), and I'm a little sketchy on doing this partitioning myself, I give myself about a 50/50 shot at borking it!

[Capo]

Just in case anyone is watching this thread. We (me and SB support) came to the conclusion that one big /root partition isn't as crazy as it once may have been in the past. Performance isn't the issue here as the system lives on one hard-drive, and runaway processes can be kept at bay with careful log watching. With the newer ext3 journaled filesystem, the cahnce for corruption is also decreased.

Yes it's a tradeoff, but everything is, and I'm good with that.

And Kudo's to Knightfoo and SB support for alleviating my concern's:)