Linux Should I bother with this box?

You might also consider having a seperate partition for /tmp as that is generally writeable by any user, so from a security standpoint, a cracker (or just naughty user) could potentially fill up /tmp, thus filling up the same partition the root filesystem is on, and you would be fubared!

 

Thanks for the info. So, how about this, based on the above:

/sda1/
/sda2/boot
/sda3/swap ( 1 G ? twice RAM )
/sda4/temp
/sdb1/home
.... home carries on from there across /sdc also, with /sdd being NTFS for LAN systems backup.

My thinking was have the user files physically separate to isolate for hardware failures.
This would probably leave a sizeable chunk of space "vacant" on sda though.

I see what you did size-wize, but are their any "typical" allocations for the main partitions, other than the swap being atleast RAM sized? I guess the install will obviously dictate minimum sizes, but if I am going to do it manually I will have to spec it all... so this is where I get stuck....

 

50MB for boot is overkill... It just holds kernel images and grub... I have 5 images, and grub on it, takes up 7.6MB...

My (Gentoo) desktop root partition is 7.4 GB big, filled up to 5.1GB, with /tmp on it measureing 43MB atm. But this depends on what you are planning on installing... I personally would make it a bit bigger next time, because on Gentoo compiling takes up HEAPS of space in /var/tmp/ (OpenOffice from source = 4-6GB of workspace needed...)

Swap, 1-2 times RAM size, I have 2x (= 1GB); but it rarely gets filled beyond 200MB (I have 512 MB RAM in case you didn't figure that out yet )

/tmp, depends on your needs... On a server I administrate it is a separate partition (logical ) and it is 500MB in size. But if you open up lots of media files directly from the internet (open, not save, that goes to /home ) you might want to increase this... Altough 500 MB is nicely sized IMO.

/home... As big as you need it to be... Just think about, if you run a desktop system, lots of .<name> config files will be stored in you homedir. They take up a lot

Code:

laptop ~ # df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6             7.4G  5.1G  2.0G  73% /
[s]udev                  236M  204K  236M   1% /dev[/s]
[s]shm                   236M     0  236M   0% /dev/shm[/s]
/dev/hda7              16G  5.0G   11G  33% /home  [b]<==[/b]
[s]/dev/hdc               49M   49M     0 100% /mnt/cdrom[/s]
/dev/hda1             152M  7.6M  137M   6% /boot
/dev/hda2              13G  6.5G  6.3G  51% /mnt/win
laptop ~ # du -sh ~glider/
3.5G    /home/glider/ [b]<==[/b]

5GB used up, 3.5GB used in "userfiles"; therefor 1.5GB used in config files... Quite big so it seems

EDIT: whoops, I forgot a backup dir I had in /home... That takes up ~1.3GB; so 200MB for configs which is more reasonable...

 

OK, I see what you mean, thanks that helps. I have noticed that the "pre-packed" installs don't separate anything other than swap and boot mostly. Is there a ( idiot proof ) way of doing a manual partition without borking it up? Last attempt I made (with partman? it was Ubuntu) ended up with four 256M partitions, and 15G of space sitting about with no use, the other 3 drives had nil.

I couldn't come to grips with how you selected/made logical partitions, etc, using the interface. I seemed to go around in circles, with changes getting undone, or not made. I can do partitioning, I get the idea, used FDISK for years. Somehow I just get a mental block in partman, it seems Ubuntu has something missing compared to plain Debian?

I think I have narrowed it down to one of 2 options. Either CentOS, or Debian server, file storage ( Samba ) with remote access via SSH or secured VPN tunnel. Basically this machine will be a repository for data that I can share on my home LAN or access remotely from my work office.

I tried out CentOS, very straight forward installation, was logged in via SSH using Putty on my main XP Pro machine, all in less than 15 minutes from sticking the install CD in the server. CentOS I can do, had RH before, kinda know my way around on it.
but....
I would like to give Debian another try, tho I am not sure which way to do the install, the more I read on the main site the more confused I get. Seems a net install may be the best? I would rather get only what I need and keep it as clean as possible, this machine will have NAT'ed internet exposure 24/7, so less security "issues" and services to watch is a good thing.

..off to read more .....

I appreciate everybody's input and patience .......

 

cfdisk will give you a "graphical" partitioning thingy... but I did it with plain fdisk tough Don't forget to "write" before you exit.

Oh yeah, Debian netinstall is the thing you need (think it's called sarge, not so sure...)

 

Debian Etch/testing net install is what you want. Don't worrying about the word 'testing', many servers run it.