im getting ready to help a friend put together a samba server using debian sarge distro.

with 2 HDs i just left most of the partitions to / and /home. i figured i could creat a directory in / and then chmod as needed.

with 5 HDs how do i mount them, what mount point? can i call them all /home?

no software raid yet. i tried that once with debian and it just was ugly, im not that skilled yet. yes i know that would be a better option to stripe them, but maybe with whitebox or some other GUI based install, but not with a CLI one yet for me.

just want to know what mount points to give all the extra HDs...

as of now i plan on putting /boot and /root in the first 2 partitions slots on the first HD, and /swap on the first partition on the 2nd HD with /home on either of them, but after that i am lost...

please advise. keep in mind the extra HDs are for sharing out data only, this is for a home use, not a business so security is not as large of an issue vs convienience.

thanks.

You should have (in my traditional UNIX opinion) the following filesystems at a minimum on a Linux install.

/boot >=128MB
/ >=2GB
/usr >=2GB
/tmp >=512MB
/home >=2GB (this is very much driven by the users)
/var >=2GB (This would be larger for database or mail servers)

As for the other drives -- How about:

/mnt/hde
/mnt/hdf
/mnt/hdg

then put the shares wherever you like on the disks and point samba to them accordingly. /home should probably be larger than I pointed out above, and in this case might benefit from having it's own disk (to ensure the users have a lot of room in their ${HOME}s), but that's up to you and the end users to decide.

how in the debian install do i creat the mount point /mnt/hde/f/g/ ...etc...???

do i just leave them be and mount them manually? little more..


as for not worring about /usr/tmp/var its simple. i dont need the security of the data that will be kept in those partitions. if i have to start over i just have to make sure the data on the shars is backed up. the rest of the box can go poof for all it matters.

basically it is a file server that might become a media box.

I have no idea as to how to set the disks up with the installer. I've not seen the Debian installer in over 4 years. I'd just do my normal install and then mkfs them and add them to fstab.

Splitting up the disks is something you really should do, even if you think you don't need it. On a single partition system something screwed up in /tmp hoses your whole filesystem. Broken up, you can bring the system up, fix the problem fs and proceed with life as normal. The time to bust out the filesystems now could save you a reinstall later, and is really just a good idea. I really dislike the fact that Linux installers promote the use of a big / and swap and nothing else... It *will* bite everyone who builds systems that way, given enough time.

ok kewl. ill keep that in mind for future builds.

ok could i get some details on how to mkfs and fstab them?

man 5 fstab

man -k mkfs