How do most people partition the boot disk with Red Hat Linux?

[Paul Mancillas]

I'm curious to know, how do most people partition the boot disk with Red Hat Linux? Do you just use the default / and /boot file systems? Or do you create separate file systems for /home, /root, /tmp, /usr and /var? What are the advantages of using one method vs. the other?

Thanks

Paul

[tony j. podrasky · Accepted solution]

Hi Paul;

Partitioning a disk is a very personal thing.

The best way to look at it is like a house: would you like a house that is one big room (one partition) where you can immediately get to whatever you want (and so can anyone else) or would you like a bunch of rooms (separate partitions) where you put specific things in each room (and only people you allow into the room can touch your stuff)?

I personally carve up my disk into 10 partitions. /boot is mounted read-only so it is pretty safe from getting clobbered by a bad command.

The other advantage is that I can backup and recreate specific partitions easily.

/home is backed up every night, but /tmp and /var are done once a month.

regards,
tonyp

[Martin Burnett_2]

Hello Paul,

As Tony states it really is a personal preference/system specific issue. Some things to consider are:

1. Disaster recovery plan.
2. Backup strategy.
3. Future growth of file systems.
4. Physical size of system disks.
5. Security requirements.
6. Performance.

I will say that I don't know of to many experienced administrators that simply create /boot and then put everything else into the / (root) file system ;-)

HTH

Martin

[Bernie Vande Griend]

Along with what Martin says, it also depends on what you are using the system for. Is it a workstation, server, if server what type? It is usually best to separate out the areas that are most susceptible to growth and make them their own filesystems so that if they fill up it will not hurt other areas. If you have a simple server that you are using for a 1 or maybe 2 applications such as a DNS server or Radius server, home directory server, etc, then maybe you don't need 10 separate filesystems. I would almost always make a separate filesystem for /var and /tmp however since they are most likely to grow. And if you do more than 1 user on the system, a /home is also a very good idea. Other partitions/filesystems depend more on what you are using the system for.

[Kodjo Agbenu]

Hello Martin,

An important thing is to make your personal data visible when you type "df". Doing this, if you have to re-install the system or to move data from a host to another, it will get more easy to identify the directories to be backed-up before the operation.

At home, I keep personal data in :

/home => user data
/usr/local => programs that I personally compiled
/usr/local/squid => because I wanted to keep squid separate from the rest of the system
/usr/local/wine => same explanation as for squid

For the system itself, I would suggest you to keep close with what you distribution suggests, but you can safely decide to keep the whole system in a single 2Gb-partition.

My SuSE 7.2 at home has the following layout :

/ (2Gb)
/opt (1Gb)
/var (256 Mb)
/usr (2Gb)
/tmp (256 Mb)

However my RedHat 7.2 at work is more simple :

/ (2.5 Gb)
/data (1.5 Gb)


For the application data, it is generally a good idea to have separate partitions, so you can make sure that an application that grows up to the filesystem size cannot prevent the whole system (and other applications) from working.

For example:

/opt/oracle (4Gb)
/oradata1 (768 Mb)
/oradata2 (768 Mb)
/oradata3 (768 Mb)


If you want a way to easily resize, destroy and re-create your filesystems, I would suggest that you use LVM. With SuSE or Mandrake, it is included in the distribution. However with RedHat, you have to do it by hand. If you want more information on this, please post a more specific question on that topic.

Good luck.

Kodjo