Newbie parbreastioning question 4351

From this and other messages it sounds as if you want maximum functionality, and to use it as a learning experience. It didn't see any answers that addressed your needs...

First, swap size. You have apparently heard the myth that swap should be twice as large as RAM. That was true on BSD systems some years ago, for reasons that would take up a lot of space to describe. It does not now and has *never* been a useful rule of thumb for Linux.

Swap space on Linux depends on how much Virtual Memory (VM) you need, minus how much RAM you actually have. If you have a need for 256Mb of memory, and you have 256Mb or more of RAM, then you don't really need any swap space! (In practice, that isn't quite true though. Inactive processes can be swapped out, thus gaining a little extra RAM. If that is useful, then at least some swap space is recommended.)

In your case, if you never run X or any huge application, it might be that 256Mb of VM is enough. You probably do want to let inactive processes be swapped, because that will increase the RAM available for caching and speed up your system as a file server.

Hence roughly 200Mb of swap would probably be a great plenty.

Yourboot parbreastion is twice as big as you'll likely need too, but that doesn't really make any difference.

You have a huge considering thatusr is separate. You could easily get by with a 200Mb parbreastion, and probably 3Gb forusr. My server is using 65Mb in, and 2.4Gb inusr. Note that is also with a full distribution with X and everything on it. (Based on a Slackware distribution though.)

You do want a separate parbreastion forhome, and you want everything that you are going to share over the network on separate a parbreastion(s) too.

Now, I am *not* saying this is the easiest thing to accomplish, though it is not at all hard. It *will* give you an opportunity to learn unix systems admin too. Things like what to do withtmp, withvar, withopt will all come up (symlinks are your friend!).

Here is what I would do,

Parbreastion Size Mb boot 24 swap 200 root 160 usr 3000 var 1500 local 1000 u1 1900 u2 2500

You might want to combine the last two, or split that last one in two, or some other combination that matches the filesystems you want to share with other systems.

You can mountusr as read only too. Note that a few symlinks are immediately necessary.

If you don't make much use ofusr-local orusr-src, you could reduce the size oflocal by 500Mb perhaps, and add that to your network shared parbreastions.

The point is thatu1 andu2 (or whatever you choose to name them and however you choose to divide up the space available) are separate parbreastions that are available for networked sharing with other systems.

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