I am in the process of bringing up a server which will be used for e-mail, web and ftp services. This machine will be supporting my personal domain and will be running in my home. So, I will also on occasion use the machine as a workstation. At any rate, I have installed FC6 and the machine is up and running now. However I used the default install which gave me two disk partitions which are /boot and /. I don't believe this is adequate. So, I am looking for some sizing recommendations for my system. It is running two 500GB SATA drives configured as a RAID 1 volume.

These were the partitions I was thinking of creating:
/var (host FTP and WEB)
/usr
/home
/mail (I want to isolate the mail to its own partition)
/tmp

I was thinking of allocating 100GB for the /mail partition. The /var partition would also be a large partition. These two will be the largest and I may decide to give more space to one over the other. What I am not as sure about is what are recommended sizes for /usr, /home and /. The temporary partition will not be two large.

Also, since the directories /usr, /var and /home already exist in the current / partition, do I need to do anything special when creating the partition to get the data transferred?

Thanks for the help.

/boot 100MB
/ 20GB
/home 10GB
/mail 350GB
/var 100GB
swap 2GB



/usr and / most likely wont change in day to day operations as a server so should be fine on the one partition
even /home will not get much use

to transfer var /mail etc to a new partition

mount the new partition somewhere else

/mnt/var
/mnt/mail

shut down the server services (prevent data loss) and copy all the files

cp -R /var /mnt/var
cp -R /var /mnt/mail

unmount them mount them to their new home
/mail
/var

note you will lose every thing on the root (/) drive in var and mail folders hense need to copy.

I don't know for that set up I would go for something to this effect.
This setup prevents segfaults based on 'NO space left on device' errors.

But this configuration doesn't isolate the public areas (/var and /mail) from the root directory. Therefore there is no protection should someone try to fill these sections up. That was the whole intent of separating them from the / partition. I can see where it would be OK to leave /usr on the root partition. My only thoughts about separating it out would be that I can make the partition read only thus preventing any accidental overwrites of basic commands.

The system is a server not a desktop PC

/var and /mail
are the working directories and need to be isolated for backup, security and restoration purposes