partitioning

[Kevin Martin]

On 07/16/2014 12:21 PM, dustin kempter wrote:
> Hi all, I am an SA in training and ive been reading a lot about the importance of separating out your workspace/server into separate
> partitions such as /, /data, /home, /ftp, /usr, /boot vs dividing it into just a /, /boot, /data. and it seems that doing it how Ive
> been reading about with more partitions is more secure but what about when one partition becomes full? isnt that more of a problem
> vs one big /data partition where that is not an issue? what would you guys say the best solution would be? also read that you want
> to have twice as much swap as RAM and that dividing swap into 2 partitions helps with performance. is this true?
> 
> thanks
Dustin,

Take a look at the archives...this exact topic was beat to death not that long ago.

Historically, separating partitions was the way to go as it took less time to fsck a smaller partition than a larger partition and
to recover a smaller partition than a larger partition.  That's how I do it and have always done it, but that doesn't necessarily
make it right nowadays.  It's a bit more time consuming setting it up that way and I'm not sure if there are benefits to doing that
so much anymore (especially with the changes made in the last couple of years in regards to the /usr consolidation and the fact that
computers and disk drives are so much faster these days).  You do/can run into problems where disk space runs out on the partition
but alot of that can be mitigated if you are using LVM partitions (something else that I don't use as it seems like added
administrative overhead).  If you partition your servers into / and /boot and a swap space and just add a /data directory under /
then the disk space issues should not be relevant.  As far as swap space, it depends on how much ram you have.  If you have a server
with 64Gb of ram are you really going to have a swap partition with 128Gb?  I doubt it.  Since swap space is used when ram is
completely used up (and maybe for core file creation?) you probably will need some amount of swap (again, depending on what your
server is being used for) but I don't think the rule of thumb anymore is twice the amount of ram.  As to multiple swap partitions,
there's a brief writeup about that at http://linux.about.com/od/ptn_howto/a/hwtptn10t02.htm that you might find interesting.

Kevin