Hi,
I think that answer a question about the best partitioning schema would be the same as answer to a question about what love is.
So, I'm not looking for the definitive truth, but simply wether my thoughts could be convenient in a production environment or not.

I continue to hear about maintain almost /home /var /tmp /usr / on separate partitions.
Well, now my questions (regarding a generic production server running applications but not directly accessed by users) are:

- The major user activity is by the administrator; shouldn't be better maintain /root instead of /home, on a separate partition? (or both)

- many applications, or administration sw, or hw vendor add-on, use /opt. Shouldn't be a good idea (same as for /usr) to reserve a partitions for /opt too?

- same as above for /srv (that some distros or apps use instead of /var/...)

- A matter arising from needing so many partitions is to need many different hd (not the first choice for many reasons), or to use extended partitions or LVM. Which should be the better choice in a production environment? ...to use only the 4 primary parts (for swap, /, /boot, ? ) and avoid the use of extended/LVM, or to have a large number of different "partitions" with the use of extended/LVM ?

I know that the right answers depend on particular circumstances, but I hope someone might has some good tip related to the management of enterprise production environments and related concerns

Thanks in advance,
best regards

Hi tantan,


dont miss the goal behind keeping different partitioning schemas.
about /var:-
We do create /var directory on partition so that the files such as log which get continuously appended may cause a performance problem for the whole system. This may happen because those files get fragmented. Again if some how some admin working on production server goes asleep for a few days and diskspace gets filled everything should not get stopped.
Let some services stop which rely on /var partition majorly. But still you should get logon on the machine.

about /tmp:-

anybody including nobody has an access to the /tmp directory if we keep it a directory we cant enforce some partition specific rules such as noexec permission on the /tmp partition so no user can run malicious programs or his own demons from the /tmp partition.
There is a bypass to this by creating a loopback disk which will degrade the performance.

In short as I'm used to and think:-
We need such partitions sytem on WEB / MAIL /APPLICATION
servers

/
/var
/tmp
Sizes vary depending on the site

Hope this will give u the needful