I have a difficult time to understand the mountpoint scenario coming from a Windows environment. For example if I have a 20GB hdd on a system with 256MB of RAM how should my space distribution look like:

/ = 16GB
/boot = 32MB
<swap> = 128MB

but what about "/home" and "/usr" will they automatically be covered by "/"?

and what will happen if I want to add another hard disk drive later, how would it have to be configured? Can I span any of the mountpoints.

Would like to create a Linux 7.1 server with the IBM Small Business Suite installed which is consisting of IBM WebSphere Application Server including IBM HTTP Server, IBM WebSphere Studio, Lotus Domino, Lotus SmartSuite and IBM DB2 Universal Database Workgroup edition.

Also, intent to install StarOffice.

Am I correct that all those applications will install unter "/opt"?

Would very much appreciate a reply from anybody who can help me figuring this out.

You can mount any device, floppy, dvd drive, harddisk, network drive or whatever absolutely anywhere you want, providing the location you are trying to mount it is an empty directory. There's really nothign more to it than that.

You tend to split up your file system into /usr /home and / partitions (or more if you want) so as to make the system more secure, this also means that when you reinstall a system, you would only typically re-format / and /usr and leave /home intact, simply telling the system that (for example) /dev/hda8 should be mounted as /home. This makes the entrie file system fairly abstracted at certain levels, and more logical i think.

So yes, the / partition will contain /home and /usr unless you create a specific partition just for it.

to add another hard disk later, you'd simply plug the device in, and format it accordingly, then add a line to your /etc/fstab file which might read...

/dev/hdb1 /morespace vfat defaults 0 0

which would mount the drive under the directory /morespace using a vfat (microsoft fat32) filesystem. all you need to is ensure the directory exists, and yuo're away. You can always have to option of moving anything, such as /usr of /home onto a separate drive at any time you wish, as long as it is mounted in the right place, the system will not know anything else.

Thank you very much Chris,

Think the concept is clear now, however, just to be certain please confirm the following.

Lets assume that I install my initial server with one HDD only and format it with:

/ = ??MB
<swap>
/boot = 32MB
/home = 1GB
/usr = 1GB
/opt = ??MB

and at a later date, when running out of space under /home for example I can add another HDD and format the entire HDD as /home followed by editing the mounting point in /etc/fstab file to read: /dev/hdb1 /home vfat defaults 0 0

Now, if this is correct I would have yet another question. All those Linux developers out there in cyber space who write software need to write an installation procedure when compiling the rmp for example which tells the software to install under / or /opt or /usr or /home how do I know which mounting point(s) is/are used most frequently in order to provide the most space for that/those particular directory(ies). Are there any rules to this?

Lastly, going back to the installation of an additional HDD. I would, of course, have to remove the /home from hdb0 first before mounting /home at hdb1 or will this span? What would be the procedure for doing this.

Thank you very much in advance for your assistance it is really good to know that there are people out there ready to help!

Wolfie2001

95% of installations go into /usr... if i run 'du -x -h --max-depth=1' i get...

20k ./lost+found
8.0k ./boot
23M ./var
48k ./tmp
268k ./dev
7.5M ./etc
658M ./usr
5.1M ./bin
36M ./home
42M ./lib
8.0k ./mnt
4.0k ./opt
57M ./root
5.1M ./sbin

Good enough guide as any...

I'm sure that files generally don't span multiple devices. RAID systems do that, but that's a very different issue. But although it's a nice idea at first, you surely wouldn't want that to happen. You'd be likely to end up with a number of files split between devices, making a simple removal of one hdd not an option. to move the /home partition i'd personally...

edit /etc/fstab to include... (e.g.)
/dev/hdb1 /home ext2 defaults 0 0

move the current home...
# mv /home /xhome

make a new home dir
# mkdir /home

mount the bugger
# mount /home

# copy it back
cp -r /xhome/* /home

should be as simple as that. Well, that's my amateur feet-not-really-that-wet version. maybe the big kids would suggest something a bit more complex. The only issue i could think of would be to ensure that file ownership is preserved when copying a /home partition, but i'm sure mv doesn't affect that, not too sure about cp. expect so tho

if you do use cp, make sure to do a cp -p. This will preserver the permisssions on everything

Rich