Partitioning Guidelines question.
 

Hello all,

I've got a question about setting up my partitions on a Linux box. Here's the down and dirty:

- Dell PowerEdge 600SC
- Redhat 9
- Celeron 1.8Ghz
- 512 MB Ram
- (2) 40GB hard drives
- Software RAID1 (mirroring)

This is a mail server with spam filtering. So /var (specifically /var/spool for mail, and /var/lib/pgsql for Postgres) is heavily used.

I quickly found that giving /var only 8GB was a bad idea and my spam database grew and filled the disk. Here's the new scheme that i came up with:

/boot = 100MB
/ = 10GB
swap = 512MB
/var = 27GB (the rest)

I'm looking for comments on my setup. Specifically, should i just dump splitting /var and / altogether and combine them to give /var more space? Can i shrink / even more (say 2 or 3GB)?

Also, is 512MB enough for swap these days, or should i double that to 1GB, will linux even use it?

Thanks all for their advise in advance.

Regards,

--Rob

Re: Partitioning Guidelines question.
 

Too big..But can stay as it is. I'd give it 20MB/

Quote:

/ = 10GB

Too much...For standard server I think 1-2GB will do. Plus separate /home

Quote:

swap = 512MB

OK. Gives your 1GB in total.

Quote:

/var = 27GB (the rest)

With 2GB /, you'll have 35GB+ for /var. That should be enough. mavbe also separate /var/log ?

Quote:

Also, is 512MB enough for swap these days, or should i double that to 1GB, will linux even use it?

It depends on your system, how much traffic it gets and so on...See how much free memory you have...With 512MB RAM, there should be free memory all the time.

Mara, Thanks for the good info.

I think i'll drop down the size of /. Also, /home gets virtually no use (this is a mail relay server that scans mail for spam and holds it in a Postgresql database).

Lastly, my boss is convinced that we should dump the whole partition scheme and make a big /. Any convincing arguments for why i should put in all this effort on these partitions would be greatly appreciated. In other words, help me convince my boss!

--Rob

At least, / and /var should be separate in case that the server gets flooded (and /var gets full). Strange things can start happening then...That's why I also think that /var/logs should be separate (during flooding, it should write all what's needed to the logs, so you know what happend; the other way - /var/logs flooded, then the server can work more or less OK and still handle mail).
There are no special reasons for separate /boot, IMO.