Hi,

Ok, so I want to know how to partition my hard drive that it is best suited for hosting a site. I am not intenting to have a large number of viewers; just a personal webpage although I may decide to run an e-mail server in a near future. In addition, I do a quite bit of coding on this machine for various projects.

I've a P4 1.6 GHz, 256 DDR RAM and 60 GB's of space planning to run Slackware 9.1. Here's my scheme:

/boot 400 MB
/tmp 1.5 GB
/var 18 GB
/home 20 GB
/usr 10 GB
/ 9 GB
swap 1 GB (512 RAM would be added shortly)

I am not sure what filesystem would be best for such machine but I have heard reiserfs has the best performance but takes more space.

In addition, what are your recommendation on partitioning /usr/local and other related stuff to further facilitate the maintainiblity and ease of system's management?

My network topology is as follow:

Router/firewall [hardware] _ Solaris
|_ XP
|_ Linux

What are the pros and cons of having the database and DNS servers run on Solaris and HTTP and mail servers on Linux?

I apologize for cramping so many questions under one thread but your help and experties are much appreciated.

Your partitioning scheme is probably fine, assuming that both your mail and web servers are going to be using /var and that your personal coding projects are going to reside in /home. If anything I'd recommend giving a little more to /var and less to /home. I'd also recommend using LVM for maximum flexability (see the LVM HOWTO for more info). That will make any misjudgements you make wrt the partitioning of your system very easy to fix. I have neither seen nore heard of any significant performance hit from using LVM, though I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has.

As for runing DNS and database on Solaris, I wouldn't expect any inter-OS compatability issues if that's what you're asking about. DNS is DNS and mysql is mysql. Just try to ensure that authentication requests to the database are not sent in cleartext.

I would trim down /boot. Seriously the majority of the time it won't ever exceed 30 to 40 megs unless you plan on having a dozen kernels to boot from, etc.

And for / I wouldn't recommend 9GB for server. I hope your not planning on installing X as its not needed. I have my webserver running Slackware 9.0 and my / partition is currently only taking up 55 megs of space. I truly believe you don't need a 9 GB partition when that majority of your files and data will be residing in /var and /home.

I would suggest a scheme like this:

/boot = 32mb
swap = 300 - 500mb I seriously have 300mb of swap for my server in which its never used. I only added it just in case. If you don't plan on alot of traffic, etc, 1GB is just wasting space especially if your going to install 512mb of RAM.
/ = 800mb - 1GB
/usr = 10GB
/tmp = 1 - 2GB
/home = 10 - 20GB
/var = Rest of space to hold www files and possibly database if you ever end up using mysql

Oops! I logged in and posted this thread under General forum but apparently I took too long and got kicked out so I assumed it didn't go through and then decided to post it under Distro -> Slackware forum. Sorry.

Thank you for your suggestions. Yes I am planning to keep serveral kernel images and what not under /boot but as far as / goes, considering /opt goes under it, I decided to set it to 9 GB but now I realize that is way more than I anticipated.

Again since I'll probably going to have only one user (beside the root) on the machine, I think /home better be reduced to less than 10 GB at most.

Any other suggestion is welcome.

In the future if you think your thread belongs in another forum, report it to a moderator to move it, don't double post it.

As far as /opt goes. If you don't install X, you won't have an /opt directory in which if this is going to be a webserver, I really see no need in having X installed, its just going to take away resources.

If your also only going to have several kernel images under /boot, I still see no need to have 400 megs allocated for it. Even a 32 meg /boot will hold 10 or even more kernels to boot from and I'm sure over time you will remove some after compiling newer one's, etc.

I'm not trying to be picky and tell you how to setup your own server, I just think its just wasting space in which you can use elsewhere on your drive and system.

Regards.

Well, as I mentioned I'm planning to code on it and frankly I would like to have at least a simple GUI at hand (I've always had a hard time coding one file at a time

Beside Slackware installation puts only KDE under /opt and other X's under /usr/X11R6.

What about other filesystems: XFS, JFS... although the more I read about ReiserFS v4, the more I get interested.