I have a 70GB drive RAID1'd that I need to install Red Hat on, then configure as an FTP server. You guys have helped me understand how to load the FTP server once I get the server loaded, but what sizes to use to properly partition the server as I load it, I always have a hard time with since I'm new to Linux. Does anyone have any advice?

Looking at other servers, they have a
/
/boot
/opt
/usr
/var
/tmp
/home
/data
swap

But not sure what's best with only 70GB for an FTP only server.

You won't need to break it down into that many partitions for something like that. At a minimum I would suggest putting whatever directory you are exposing over FTP to be on it's own partition, the rest could go onto
1 or 2 primary partitions, plus swap.

What exactly is the role of this FTP server? Is it going to be a download-only anonymous like a software mirror, or will there be individual user accounts/directories and uploads?

The FTP server will be used for a few clients to send and grab files from with their own specific accounts. They can all dump into the ftp root since nothing is highly sensitive, or create a subfolder if they want.

MS3FGX, does my reply to your last question change anything?

Well, if there are going to be multiple users, presumably you are going to be serving files out of /home, so you would want to put that on it's own partition.

If you were doing a big anonymous FTP server like a distribution mirror or something, you could potentially change the default FTP directory to something like /mnt/ftp and mount a second partition on that.

This is my first FTP server, so I'm not really sure where vsftpd makes the root at, or if it can (or should be for security sake) changed.

I think your file system permissions protect your folders. Not sure a partition scheme would protect it anymore.

Partitions tend to force space requirements.

Could be wrong.

Thanks. I didn't think so, but wasn't sure.

So how would you guys break up 70GB if you were doing this? would be great to see a few examples, even if its for larger total space, i can always scale down. I know 70GB isn't much these days.

By default, it going to be the home directory of whatever user connects, so /home/username. So putting /home on it's own partition would separate all the user's FTP directories from the OS.

But for example on my server the OS is stored on an 8 GB CF card, and all remote-accessible files are held on a 1 TB HDD. I want to keep local user accounts on CF and only the publicly accessible data on the HDD, so in my case I don't want to put all of /home on the HDD. So I only allow the user "ftp", and have the FTP root set as /mnt/pub_ftp (where the 1 TB drive is mounted).

There are a lot of ways you could set the server up, and it is hard to argue for any one "right" way. In your case, I would probably just do three partitions. One for the root filesystem (/), one for /home (where the FTP accounts will be), and the third for a small swap space.

ok, thanks. I'll give it a shot!

Keep in mind once you have your ftp server up and running every time you add a user the user has the ability to view all all system files normally read only. If you don't want that then use chroot to set their home directory for example /home/username

Thanks JMC, i will remember that.