Although I was able to get Slackware up and running earlier this year - something I found reasonably easy - I was never quite sure why I was making setup decesions (even after doing a good bit of reading) and once it was up and running I didn't concern myself.

Now I'm faced with retiring the previous machine and setting up a "new" one and was looking for some input on a number of questions.

The "new" system is a Pentium II/300mhz, 484mb RAM, 20gb HD, 20gb HD, 30gb HD.

The primary purpose of this system is as a webserver for a small office (intranet). There will be up to (5) users browsing, with a maximum of (10) users (at least that's how many offices there are).

Obviously the marjority of the storage is going to web content.

Questions:

How much space to alot to /root, /usr, /opt, and /home (each is its own partition, right)?

How big a swap file?

All posting to the web site will be be thru webmaster or assistant (2 users), so user accounts is not an issue.

How do I partition the 2nd and 3rd HD to be an extension of /home - extended partition of a logical drive?

Does it matter which file system I use?

I seem to recall that there were two different FTP programs that came with the Slackware distro, is one better than another?

Currently have available Slackware v.10.1, is it imparitive that I download the lastest version?

Any insight would be helpful.

Hi,

And welcome to LQ and the Slackware forum!

Well, if there's only two users and no action going on home on
a separate partition doesn't make much sense.

I'd probably use something like
hda2 /tmp (4GB)
hda3 swap (400MB)
hda1 / (rest)

hdb1 /home (2GB)
hdb2 swap (400MB)
hdb3 /var (10GB)
hdb4 /usr (rest)

hdb3 /var/www

I think that about double RAM size will do, and with this
set-up (3 HDDs) swapping to two independent devices
may prove faster than all swap on one disk.


With that setup you probably wouldn't even need that.


They all have certain advantages/disadvantages. If the site
consists of many (and small) files I'd go with ReiserFS.


Avoid ftp, setup ssh & scp for the guys.

Not if you download and install all relevant security fixes for
10.1 ...


Cheers,
Tink

Hmm.

Some of this enters "religious" territory, but...

Swap space, swap partition, rule of thumb, is 2x RAM (although there are as many opinions about this as there are users, that's pretty much the rule).

Partition sizes... assuming you partition for / (root), /usr, /usr/local, /home, /opt, and /var and you're only doing a web server (no user stuff in home directories and the like), well, you don't need all that much in any of them.

• root can be something like 2G
• /usr can be something like 4G
• /usr/local can be something like 4G
• /opt can be something like 4G (and that's a lot more than needed)
• /var can be 1G - 2G (and that's a lot more than needed)
• /home can be... well, 4G to cover you.

That leaves you with a whole lot of disk doing nothing much, doesn't it?

If you're going to have a data base (MySQL or something), you might want to add a partition /var/lib/mysql sized about 5G or bigger, depending on what you expect if you're going to be doing a LAMP application.

I've been using the Reiser file system for a couple of years with no problems whatsoever -- it has the benefit of logging and appears to be reliable and fast. YMMV.

You say you're doing an intranet? You must (yeah, must) do things with the openssh suite -- that's scp, sftp, ssh and the like. Don't open yourself up to problems with the likes of rlogin, "bare" ftp and all of those.

You'll be better off if you get Slackware 10.2 (or wait a couple of weeks (maybe a couple of weeks, maybe longer) for Slackware 11.0). If you're in a hurry, get the CD-ROMs for 10.2 and install that.

Given that you've got a total of 70G available, you can just size all the individual partitions at, oh, 10G and be done with it (that allows room for growth), but, then again, you can mount the second and third drives as back up partitions and that might be more sensible. You really don't need all that much space in a web server, and if you're not going to have people logging in to accounts, well, /home doesn't need hardly any space.

The one thing that might be useful is throw more RAM in it -- you're not going to be disk bound, you're probably going to be memory and processor speed bound and more RAM can never, ever hurt.

And, finally, think about where your web content is going to live and size a mounted partition for it. If you're going to use /var/www, mount a partition to /var/www (say, part of that second 20G drive). That's where your load will be (if you're going to be up- and downloading, say) and it wouldn't hurt to mount that separately.

Other than that, well, all the best.

Thanks for the pointers and advice.

RE: More System RAM

Yes, I had toyed with this idea, but was reluctant to spend too much on this project. I did purchase a 256mb chip for the third SIMM slot (64mb, 128mb, 256mb), and had considered pulling the smaller chips and replacing them with 256 or 512's - but I did not have an immediate place to put the pulled chips to use.

'Course the "ideal" would be to max-out the motherboard.


RE: SQL down the road

Yes, I was wondering about this and is being considered in the back of my mind - Thanks for mentioning it.


RE: Downloading Current Version

Yes, of course, why not.


RE: Why so much storage space

I'm never quite sure how much detail to reveal in these posts, a balance between trivial and relevant.

I'm working in a small Real Estate office and the web content is going to consist of a lot of images - pics and scanned docs - plus other knowledge base stuff.


RE: Security Concerns

This is a complete unknown to me.

I've got DSL to the building (and then to the desktop thru the LAN), I'm sitting behind my Provider's security - is ignorance bliss?


Thanks again.

This may seem nit-picky and I'll probably get (rightly?) stomped on for making it, but I would make sure to put the biggest simm in the first bank and the smallest in the last bank, assuming they are all the same speed. This is to minimize the inter-bank latency resulting from using progressively more memory.

The other pointers offered make good sense. Whatever swap partition size(s) you use, you might as well split it accross each drive.

If this is going to be a "mission-critical" server with $ involved, you will probably want to keep regular backups. With all that extra space, this might be a good use for some of it. (A tape drive also never hurts, but I haven't splurged for one of these yet.)

The security forum has some good threads on SSH.

Happy Slacking,

Garry

No - ignorance is the first step to being rooted.

You want to make sure that a) your DSL modem is in fact
a router that disallows incoming packets that aren't part of
an established connection.

You want to make sure that the server machine fires up
no services that aren't required (slack is very conservative
in this respect, so it won't be too tedious).


Cheers,
Tink