Partition advice
 

Just curious what you guys have found works. If you could share your schemes and the theories behind them - e.g., I have heard for a server its good a idea to have a separate partition for /var - so that a DOS logging attack can only fill up that partition and not bring an entire system to its knees.

Any other similar security or performance ideas? The only other one I hear commonly is a swap partition twice the size of your RAM.

Keep your /home separate from your main partition as well.

I agree with barryman_5000. Your /home partition should be seperate. That way, you can re-install or upgrade without re-formating that partition and maintain you data as intact...

If you duel boot, you should maintain a seperate FAT32 partition for transfering data between the OSes...

keep your /usr also separate coz it filled my / partition and caused the system not to start so keep it in a separate partition with enough space and also keep the /tmp separate it might help

the /home thing is useful since it'll keep your settings and data intact

The "swap should be double your RAM" comes from waay back when RAM came in 8MB DIMMs, or less.
It still holds, but your swap should be no more than 512MB. I have 1.25GB of RAM in my main box, and the 512MB swap partition (set up before a *serious* RAM upgrade) never gets used.

lol - I don't know why you call that way back - to me way back was when DIMMs came as 32k or 64k. But the REDHat swap partition guide caps the limit at 2G. That is, RH ES v3 recomends: 2X the size of your RAM, Min 32M, Max 2G.

How in the world would 8M dimms be significant in this scheme?

Are you just saying from an era when memory was a lot smaller than it is currently?

For really flexible partitioning, look at LVM.

I once had the problem I was compiling OpenOffice from source, and first my /var was 1G, was to less, so making it 2G, compiling again, disk again full, and had to make it 4G. After that, it compiled and removed everything it left on /var, so there remained 4G not used in /var. Now that was in FreeBSD, in Linux I use LVM and could change the size of partitions without restarting my computer!

If you're interested, look at

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/index.html

If you're not interested, I can understand as well, cause this wasn't really your question, but anyway.

It's not like there was a particular date on which the "make swap twice RAM" became obsolete, but back in the days where having, say 16Mg of RAM was considered hot stuff, defining a suitably large swap space was vitally important because it was not uncommon for the system memory to be completely used by the apps that were running (thus necessitating the use of the swap space). Today however, modern PC's typically have at least 256 Mg of RAM if not 512, and it becomes an increasingly unlikely event for the system to use all of its memory and have to resort to using swap. As a result, if you allocated a 1G swap space for a system with 512 Mg RAM, all you're really doing is wasting disk space. Note that it isn's harmful to allocate a big swap, but realistically it will never be used. I'd suggest setting up a swap space of 256Mg tops, regardless of the amount of RAM you are using, but that's just a matter of personal preference. -- J.W.

Yeah, it was just an example.

A 32k DIMM ... did you have to wind it up? Or leave it in the sun for a few days?:D

It's all relative...