partitioning new installation

[Fraser Campbell]

James Knott wrote:

> One thing I've noticed, is that it's easy to increase a partition size,
> but not decrease.  When I try to decrease a partition size, using Yast
> LVM in SUSE 10, it complains about editing a mounted drive.  No such
> complaints about increasing the size of the same partition.

Yes, shrinking is harder.  Opinionated statements follow :-)

My opinion is that if you use LVM it makes most sense to allocate 
minimal space initially unless you are 100% sure of usage patterns and 
100% sure that the space you are allocating is actually required.

So when using LVM it is most sane to leave space unallocated and as 
usage patterns emerge you allocate a bit more space here and there as 
needed.

Whether I'm installing to a 36G or a 300G array I always start with this:

   Filesystem                Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
   /dev/mapper/system-root   384M  139M  246M  37% /
   /dev/cciss/c0d0p5         132M   40M   93M  30% /boot
   /dev/mapper/system-local  1.0G   33M  992M   4% /local
   /dev/mapper/system-opt    512M   56M  457M  11% /opt
   /dev/mapper/system-tmp    1.0G   33M  992M   4% /tmp
   /dev/mapper/system-usr    1.0G  386M  639M  38% /usr
   /dev/mapper/system-var    1.5G   78M  1.5G   6% /var

I still get a lot of people who complain that /usr is too small with the 
above setup, in our usage it rarely grows since we're installing non-RPM 
based apps into /opt, /local or other.  I say /usr is 3 times as big as 
it needs to be.

I prefer the approach of oops, we're a little low there and taking 10 
seconds (not exaggerating) to increase a partitionn that oh crap we're 
out of space, what can I symlink to for a few more gigs?
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml