HOWTO Configure Linux over multiple hard drives
Hello All, I am looking at setting up another box with 9.0. With this one, I was planning to do a little experimenting. I heard a while back that putting different directories on different drives made the machine more efficient. I am open to suggestions on configurations Here is what I know for sure. 1. I know that Windows 2000 will be on the first hard drive (hda) all by itself. 2. I know I will put /home on a Hard Drive all by itself. 3. I would like to have a drive dedicated to nothing but placing files that would be shared between users. Now, outside of 9.3 GB Drive for Windows 2000, I have ... 2 Western Digital 6.2 GB drives. 1 Western Digital 8.4 GB drive. 1 Western Digital 9.5 GB drive. What I have seen so far tells me the following (please correct me if I am wrong about any of this.) a. /usr should get its own partition (and should be mounted read only?) to protect it from filesystem failures caused by system crashes. b. Have swap on its own hard drive alone with nothing else. (Will having 6GB of swap enhance the performance of the machine or is this just overkill.) c. If you don't have swap on its own drive, make sure that /var and /usr ARE NOT on the same drive with swap. (after reading this, my question is 'ok if this is the case, what is safe to put on the same disk as swap?') Thanks for reading through this, and as I said, I am all ears on suggestions about how best to configure this machine. -=Thinker
On Sun, 07 Dec 2003 20:35:26 -0500, Thinker
I am looking at setting up another box with 9.0. With this one, I was planning to do a little experimenting. I heard a while back that putting different directories on different drives made the machine more efficient. I am open to suggestions on configurations
... the REALLY IMPORTANT question is, "what is it you're trying to accomplish or what are your requirements"? IOW, the performance gains you might realize will be minimal, compared to the effort, if you're running a personal workstation. considering today's hardware and current Linux distros, all this talk about "where to put the 'swap' and '/' and so forth is an irrelevent point special, dedicated servers for a LAN might be a different story -- /// Michael J. Tobler: motorcyclist, surfer, skydiver, \\\ \\\ and author: "Inside Linux", "C++ HowTo", "C++ Unleashed" /// It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag.
On Sun, 2003-12-07 at 21:08, mjt wrote:
On Sun, 07 Dec 2003 20:35:26 -0500, Thinker
wrote: I am looking at setting up another box with 9.0. With this one, I was planning to do a little experimenting. I heard a while back that putting different directories on different drives made the machine more efficient. I am open to suggestions on configurations
... the REALLY IMPORTANT question is, "what is it you're trying to accomplish or what are your requirements"? IOW, the performance gains you might realize will be minimal, compared to the effort, if you're running a personal workstation. considering today's hardware and current Linux distros, all this talk about "where to put the 'swap' and '/' and so forth is an irrelevent point
special, dedicated servers for a LAN might be a different story
I will be running a personal workstation. Main considerations will be web developent, running apache and mysql as a test server for my code, and personal things like browsing and email. I would like to install as many things as possible on this box considering that I will obviously have the space to do so. I want to explore everything that the 9.0 distro has to offer. I would also like to configure my box with consideration to easing the upgrade to newer versions in the future and ease of recovery in case of systems failure. -=Thinker
On Sun, 07 Dec 2003 22:21:57 -0500, Thinker
special, dedicated servers for a LAN might be a different story
I will be running a personal workstation. Main considerations will be web developent, running apache and mysql as a test server for my code, and personal things like browsing and email.
... my opinion is that you wont need any special configuration to optimize /swap or whatnot
I would like to install as many things as possible on this box considering that I will obviously have the space to do so. I want to explore everything that the 9.0 distro has to offer.
... no problem - at the software install portion, just select everything you want
I would also like to configure my box with consideration to easing the upgrade to newer versions in the future
... then only install suse-built packages.
and ease of recovery in case of systems failure.
... ensure you do weekly backups -- /// Michael J. Tobler: motorcyclist, surfer, skydiver, \\\ \\\ and author: "Inside Linux", "C++ HowTo", "C++ Unleashed" ///
Hello All,
I am looking at setting up another box with 9.0. With this one, I was planning to do a little experimenting. I heard a while back that putting different directories on different drives made the machine more efficient. I am open to suggestions on configurations
Here is what I know for sure.
1. I know that Windows 2000 will be on the first hard drive (hda) all by itself.
2. I know I will put /home on a Hard Drive all by itself. 3. I would like to have a drive dedicated to nothing but placing files that would be shared between users.
Now, outside of 9.3 GB Drive for Windows 2000, I have ...
2 Western Digital 6.2 GB drives. 1 Western Digital 8.4 GB drive. 1 Western Digital 9.5 GB drive. As mentioned before, there is no pat formula. I do recommend that /home and /usr/local be mounted as separate filesystems because they would not be changed when you upgrade to a new version. In general, the root and /usr filesystems could easily be on the same
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
On Sun, 07 Dec 2003 20:35:26 -0500
Thinker
On Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 08:11:38AM -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
On Sun, 07 Dec 2003 20:35:26 -0500 Thinker
wrote: As mentioned before, there is no pat formula. I do recommend that /home and /usr/local be mounted as separate filesystems because they would not be changed when you upgrade to a new version. In general, the root and /usr filesystems could easily be on the same partition. I usually don't create a separate /boot, but if you set up /boot as a separate partition, you can protect the kernels from problems. And, the /var filesystem is another good candidate for separation. Among other things it contains system logs and spools.
Just to get a few more items on the list: have you considered a software RAID configuration? I've been very happy with my RAID-0 setup with the ext3 filesystem. In my experience ext3 was a tad more stable across crashes than reiserfs (amazing how well you can crash something using wine...:), but there's a lot of threads to be found using Google on ext3 vs reiserfs vs xfs vs ... Regards, Pieter Hulshoff
Thinker
a. /usr should get its own partition (and should be mounted read only?) to protect it from filesystem failures caused by system crashes.
This was recommended for production systems in the past. This is definitely a bad solution for you nowadays.
b. Have swap on its own hard drive alone with nothing else. (Will having 6GB of swap enhance the performance of the machine or is this just overkill.)
The usable swap partition size is limited to 2 GiB on IA32 (see man mkswap).
c. If you don't have swap on its own drive, make sure that /var and /usr ARE NOT on the same drive with swap. (after reading this, my question is 'ok if this is the case, what is safe to put on the same disk as swap?')
In the first step, don't optimize for speed but for easy administration and upgrades. Suggestions were already presented here. -- A.M.
participants (5)
-
Alexandr Malusek
-
Jerry Feldman
-
mjt
-
Pieter Hulshoff
-
Thinker