Hi everyone,

I'm setting up a new server for my church and plan to install Ubuntu (5.10 server edition) on it. But I'm a little confused as to how I should set the partitions and hard-drives up. I plan to use it mainly as a file server at first with it possibly hosting PHP-driven websites later on.

The server was donated and is used. It is a Xeon 2.2 Mhz system with 2 GB RAM.

Here is what the server looks like right now:

SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) - 36.4 GB SEAGATE ...
#1, primary, 34.9 GB, ext3, /media/sda1
#5, logical, 1.5 GB, swap, swap

SCSI1 (0,1,0) (sdb) - 36.4 GB SEAGATE ...
#1, primary, 2.1 GB, raid
#2, primary, 1.1 GB, swap, swap
#3, primary, 106.9 MB, xfs, /media/sdb3
#5, logical, 27.2 GB, raid
#6, logical, 4.3 GB, raid
#7, logical, 789.6 MB, raid
#8, logical, 789.6 MB, raid

Any recommendations would be appreciated! Should I get rid of any partitions and start over? Or is everything pretty much already in place and only needs to be formatted? Thanks.

- Matt.

those partitions look very very weird... what's all that RAID doing? it's all on one device! that's useless, and also you say you have a 36.4 GB drive containing over 1.2 terrabytes of space!

but ignoring all that, ultimately if you want the flexibility, just use LVM then you can chop the logical volumes around all you want, whenever you want.

and 2.2Mhz... wow, that's speedy! 16k or ram too?

GREAT information thanks much

Yes, this is how the machine came. :-) I'm just wiping everything and starting over. But essentially, there are two hard-drives with 36.4 GB a piece. With this goofy configuration aside, any suggestions on what would be a good way to partition it? That's the part I don't understand.

Also, would I be able to do RAID-5 on this server? Just do 5 partitions? Any suggestions?

Thanks much!

P.S. - Oops, I've corrected the figure now. Sorry.

FYI, I did just find an excellent FAQ on Linux RAID:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

This section in particular shows how to do RAID-5:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-R...O-5.html#ss5.8

And another good FAQ:

http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/linux-adv/raid.htm

Ok, I've been doing some experimenting and am having trouble getting the partitions right with a RAID setup. Right now I'm at the point during installation where you create partitions in Ubuntu and after that begin the installation process.

1) How exactly can I do this in a RAID-1 or RAID-5 format? Does RAID-5 require 3+ hard-drives, or can I simply have 3+ partitions across 2 hard-drives?

I only have 2 hard-drives in this server at 36.4 GB each. If RAID-5 does require 3+ hard-drives, I'll likely go with RAID-1 as that only requires a minimum of 2 which is what I have available.

2) Any good articles out there on how to set these partitions up? I was thinking something similar to the following:

DRIVE 1:

/boot, 250 MB, ext3
/var, 1 GB, ext3
/swap, 1 GB, swap
/, 34 GB, ext3

DRIVE 2:

/boot, 250 MB, ext3
/var, 1 GB, ext3
/swap, 1 GB, swap
/, 34 GB, ext3

Does this look like it would work well? Or would the first hard-drive look like this and the second be only mirrored with RAID?

I can deal with everything else, but RAID partitions have always confused me.

Thanks.

it depends how you're going to use the space. but most servers will use most data under /var e.g. /var/ftp /var/www /var/mail ... you should not have such a large / as you would use the partitions there to build reserved space for the underlying systems outside of /var so that they have their own diskspace and so in the event of /var /usr /home etc... filling up, there is still room in /tmp and such like for the system to keep functioning.

Also you've not said what kind of RAID this is.. software or hardware... you can't (afaik) put /boot on a software raid, as it's too complex for the bootloader to accesss. real partition wise, i would strongly suggest putting just two real paritions on each drive, or rather, /boot on the first, and then the rest within an LVM which itself can run under a single raid 5 -> /dev/hda2 & /dev/hdb2 = raid = /dev/md0. /dev/md0 if formatted as LVM = /dev/VolGroup. /dev/VolGroup is that split into partitions, /dev/VolGroup/root /dev/VolGroup/tmp /dev/VolGroup/var etc... this might seem complicated but this leaves you with very simple raid 1 mirroring on all important data. this then contains very highly flexible partitioning which can be change to suit whatever you want.

I've not used Ubuntu for a while, but i'm sure this should all be done by your installer just fine.

as for raid5 on two drives... why would you want to? it provides no use at all. if the drive with two partitions goes down, then all data is lost instantly...