On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 07:11:29PM -0500, Default User wrote: > > intended use: standard home system, single user, not mission critical > (except that to everyone, their own data is always "mission critical"). > nothing exotic or fancy. > > do really need lvm? if i have to ask, then the answer is, "probably > not". my concern was that a partition that seems spacious originally, > can over time become cramped, while another loafs with unused space. and > no one can precisely predict future needs. further, i plan to switch to > testing after the chaos dies down, and want to run that at least until > lenny becomes the next stable. so i am trying to think long term. and > re-installing every 6 months would really get old fast. > > i could just have one / partiton (plus a swap partition). That's simple, > flexible, and low maintenance. no worrying about data outgrowing > partition sizes. but the OpenBSD FAQ makes a compelling case for > multiple partitions, at least separate /, /tmp, /var, /usr, and /home > (as well as an ENCRYPTED swap partition). and that is one of the default > partitioning choices in the Debian installer. > > note: I am not trying to start an OS flame war. I just mention it for > what it's worth. > > a fresh install is a rare opportunity to do things right, so I try not > to squander it.
Agreed. I _always_ use separate partitions unless I'm trying to install to a 171 MB drive (just did that, needed NetBSD). There are _many_ compelling reasons to have separate partitions for separate major chunks of the file system. One is when drive space gets tight, you can farm it off to a new disk. LVM makes this so much easier. Its also stable. So why not? <plug-for-raid> Drives are cheap. You may like to research putting your system (/, /boot, /usr, /var, swap [with /tmp on tmpfs]) on raid1 with everything but /boot on LVM over top of the raid array. If you're really thinking long-term, then you have to plan for a drive failure. </plug-for-raid> No matter what you do, you'll need good backups: at least /etc, /boot, /home, dpkg --get-selections, aptitude search '~i!~M', fdisk -lu and sfdisk -d for each drive, onto media that you can read from a rescue system with all this plus an install CD stored off-site. For completeness, for partition sizes, I recommend: / 512 MB, /boot 65 MB, /usr 4 GB, /var 4 GB (I store backups in /var/local), /tmp 256 MB (on tmpfs), with /home whatever. I have home on a separate VG (on raw disks) from the system VG (on raid1). You could consider putting /var/tmp on a non-raid VG and making its LV striped for speed. If you don't mind a boot-up passphrase, then encrypt /home and /var/tmp (along with swap with /tmp on tmpfs). Konquorer for example puts its cache via a symlink in your home directory to /var/tmp and there's no way to change that behaviour. So even if your /home is encrypted, Konquorer's cache is not. As always, YMMV and there are as many ways to set this up as there are people on this list. Good luck, Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
