What is the consensus on the best partition scheme and size?/Keeping home separate

[Kam Leo]

On 10/25/06, Andy Green <andy at warmcat.com> wrote:
> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > On Wed, 25 Oct 2006, Andy Green wrote:
> >
> >> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> >>
> >>>   by the way, is there any reason *not* to encourage folks to use LVM
> >>> rather than simple primary/extended/logical partitions?
> >> If the LVM header area in front of the actual filesystem gets
> >> damaged, it ain't pretty.
> >
> > well, yes, there's that, but is the extra flexibility that comes with
> > logical volumes worth the extra (albeit slight) risk?  i have folks
> > ask me my opinion occasionally (yeah, that's frightening), and i
> > typically suggest that it's worth it to use LVM.  but i'm always
> > willing to listen to dissenting arguments.
>
> I also advised folks to use LVM because of the flexibility, and in some
> cases (eg, we had some boxes with 12 SATA drive slots that were not
> initially fully popuplated but would be filled over time) I'd still say
> the same as you propose, especially as they were raided underneath in
> this case.
>
> But on a box like this laptop, what does LVM being on by default really
> get you?  I don't use separate partitions for /home and such, for the
> single user laptop situation it's not beneficial.  So short of going
> nuts and taping a USB drive on top of the laptop and superglueing its
> lead in, for me at least LVM only enables the possibility of downsides
> while giving nothing good.
>
> I did get an LVM header area damaged a few months ago on another machine
> (turned out the HDD was dying) that made it more difficult than it
> should have been to recover the filesystem behind it: after that I
> stopped being an automatic LVM fan.
>
> On the original question what I normally do is have everything on a
> single /.  Usually what can fill up /home and /var is typically not done
> under root rights, and the default 5% reservation for root only on
> ext2/3 means you can then still ssh in as root to fix problems in most
> of the circumstances that you were trying to avoid with fixed sized
> separate partitions.  But none of the choices are inherently dumb and it
> depends on the exact usage scenario.
>
> -Andy
>

No one mentioned partition size. If you are planing on installing
multiple operating systems (e.g. dual boot) and doing a "everything
plus the kitchen sink" Fedora install, make sure that you have enough
disk space to hold all the packages, a Fedora DVD  iso image or two
(that's 5 GB for two DVD images), and user files.  A 20 GB partition
is barely adequate.