I'm just looking for some general tips and ideas for setting up my server. It crashed recently (root partition got corrupted due to a faulty memory stick going haywire), but fortunately I have backups of everything that matters (and most important data on different partitions). Having replaced the memory, I'm looking into starting from scratch, rather than attempting to replace any missing libraries and files that got corrupted/deleted after fixing the partition with fsck.

First of all, the file system. I've been using Ext3 in the past, but I hear ReiserFS is the way to go (I suspect it has it's pros and cons just like the rest, though). I'm not quite certain if it's mature or stable enough to be used in a server environment, so that'll be my first question. Should I go with ReiserFS, and if so, any specific reasons other than the advantage of a journaled file system?

Secondly, the partitions. I have a 200 GB WD IDE hard drive, currently partitioned as follows:

These are actually approximate values, for fdisk reports different values than I had intended. For example, I entered "+50M" for the /boot partition, but fdisk reports it as 49 MB. Not quite sure why that is. But that's not the point, anyway. I can safely remove about 20 GB from the /var/www partition and use someplace else. I was also thinking of combining /var/mysql for use with MySQL and PostgreSQL, e. g. "/var/db". 'Course, I've no idea if that's optimal at all.

Any recommendations on how I could split things up differently for optimal performance and safety in case of corruption or failure of some sort? Furthermore, if I decide to go RAID some day, would this kind of setup cause me any problems?

All advice is appreciated.

Edit: Just wondering if 512 MB swap partition is too much or little? Tthe machine has 1 GB of memory, and I don't recall seeing it use more than around 5- or 600 MB.

IMHO ext3 is best for root. But see for yourself.
Memory usage. *NIX tries to use all available RAM, if not needed for programs, then for caching and buffering. I'd say you could safely remove half of your RAM and still go without swap. I do not know any reason why 512 MB swap would be insufficient for Linux. (I know it would somewhat slow down *BSD due to the way kernel handles RAM and swap.)

That link was quite useful. Thanks!

Are there any specific reasons for why I should go with ext3 rather than ReiserFS for the root partition?

This is just my personal opinion. ext3 is mature and robust. You do not need anything special for root performance-wise, what's needed from there is loaded to RAM anyway and works from there. Reiser my give better performace if there are many small files stored on it, really not relevant for root. Last time I checked Reiser was considered more vulnerable in case of power failure and such. I may be wrong here.