[Gllug] What are the best practices for Linux partitioning & Mount points for Production systems

[Philip Hands]

On Fri, 02 Mar 2012 09:45:34 +0000, Tethys <sta296 at astradyne.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> nk oorda writes:
> 
> >What are the best practices for Linux partitioning & Mount points for
> >Production systems
> 
> I generally go for:
> 
> - /boot (ext3, about 1GB)
> - /boot2 (ext3, about 1GB)
> - LVM for the rest of the "disk" (which is usually an array
>   rather than a single disk)

My normal setup is /boot and / on non-LV partitions (normally on
software RAID1 across every physical disk in the machine, and ensuring
that every disk also has grub installed, and working, on it).  That way
you can get somewhere towards a bootable system if any single disk
survives the disaster -- being software RAID1, in extremis you can get
it to boot with root=/dev/sda2 (say) and it'll even survive you messing
up the raid modules for the kernel.

The second boot partition is not a bad idea, although if you have grub
(in multiple copies) and keep at least one old kernel around, I doubt
you're going to break things badly enough to need a second boot very
often, and if you do, chances are you'll have let the second boot rot
somehow.

Then the rest of the disks are used for LVM, with split /usr, /var ...

Of course, if you're using hardware raid it may be less easy to do that
sort of split, but I've shied away from hardware raid since finding it
hard to get at the data if one loses the controller and doesn't have a
sufficiently similar one laying around.

Oh, and as for sizing -- with the new GPT partitions, recently I've been
setting the first partition as the BIOS boot partition, using the first
1023K, then 250-ish MB for the /boot and 750-ish for the /, so that they
and the LVM partitions all start on MB boundaries.

1GB for /boot seems a bit much to me, but perhaps that'll perhaps change
now that various people are deciding that separate /usr can only work if
you have initramfs, which may well then lead to initramfs getting rather
bigger in future.  I suppose you could go for 2 512MB /boots, and if
that's ever too small you'd be able to then switch to one 1G one.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
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