Debian Web Server - Partition Sizes

[westexasman]

Looks like we have decided on Debian to act as our OS for a new web server. We are going to be hosting a few sites, nothing major, purely informational and possibly some pod-casting and embedded video.

We have three 146Gb drives that we are RAIDing together and should give us about 300Gb of space to use for the OS and all the other data. I am curious and would like recommendations on how to partition or allocate the space on the HDD.

I am a bit new to Linux and am under the assumption that I need the following partitions:

/
/swap
/var
/usr
/boot
/home

If my assumption is correct, what are some recommended guidelines, as far as space is concerned, for partitioning the drive? Also, are there any other partitions needed?

Thanks in advance!
wtm

[chris81]

Hi

By definition,

/ is required and it is used to recover / restore a broken system;
swap is required and it is used in case where there's not enough physical memory;
/var holds the configuration files for the installed software;
/usr is the place where you install your softwares;
/boot is required and holds the files required to boot the system;
/home is the place where your users keep their files, such as an adress book, pictures and so on.

Technically, all you need is /, /boot and swap. For more informations on partitons, refer to the following link :

Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

Hope it helped.
chris81

[the bassinvader]

Hi westexasman

I'm afraid your question is a little open-ended becaue it really relies on your particular setup and requirements. THe truth is you needn't do anything particularly fancy with your installation/partitioning, there is no rule book that says linux needs this and this and this etc, although I'm sure you already know this.
Personally I like to keep the root partition nice and tight. I don't accumulate software and like to keep everything clean and tidy so for me 6 Gig is loads. For my personal systems I have a seperate partition which accounts for the rest of the disk. This is just s store which I mount inside my home directory. I do this because its just convenient for a dual/multi boot.

Really you need to take a look at what exactly you need to do with your new system. If you have no special requirements you needn't have any special partitions.

If I were in your place I would probably put aside two partitions both around the 6 Gig size and use the rest as a partition purely for your webpage data. Which I would mount to the necessary folder (I'm afraid I forget the path apache uses). On th e two 6 gig partitions I'd basically install the same OS, one to act as backup in case a serious problem arises with the other (which has happened to me in the past). That way its just a quick reboot to regain functionality whilst you look over the logs etc from the primary OS.

Hope this was useful

[janrocks]

I can only really comment on my webserver. It's a small twin drive setup (too many problems with raid over the years on my antique hardware to trust it in a work environment)

/ .. 2 gigs
/boot (static boot files) 50MB . Not actually needed, but I like to have my bootstrap files well locked down on a webserver.
/swap .. I use a gig, because the server doesn't have a lot of ram and quite a few users
/var 2 gigs (plenty of space, don't need to worry about cleaning it out as often.. I could easily get away with 250MB's)
/usr 2 gigs .. server stuff like apache php and mysql and spare templates etc..
/home .. all the rest .. users files and the databases.. I put this on another drive altogether.

I guess every server will be set up differently depending on the intended uses. Mine only runs a front site, a users picture gallery, a wordpress blog area and a set of forums, so it's a very out of the book LAMP setup.