Newbie parbreastioning question 4354

Floyd L. Davidson

The original poster specified that he wanted to use it as just a file server. He wanted to put Debian on it without X. He also wanted practice using the command line. That's what I tailored my recommendation around. His NEEDS.

He is ASKING what parbreastion table would be appropriate, offering an example which makes it plain he's never done this before--certainly not with Debian and probably not with Linux.

And how does this solve the problem? It only moves around where the files are put, it doesn't magically make one parbreastion start using another parbreastion's space when necessary.

Having a bunch of parbreastions is already a pain to administer. Add in a bunch of symlinks and it becomes a royal pain.

For practical purposes, it does. Even if it doesn't actually *crash* the system, it demands human attention to fix the problem and in the meantime it's not a good idea to use the system.

We're talking about a file server. There are NOT going to be a bunch of processes being run by who knows what-who running on the system. The only potential problem is running out of disk space, but since this file server has only a 10.2gig hard drive, it's hardly going to be running any "mission critical" data. It's trivially easy to boot up a liveCD and clean up some files if necessary.

The original poster is putting Debian on the system. The OS is upgraded by typing in "apt-get upgrade".

Besides, the entire hard drive is only 10.2gigs in size. It's no big deal to copy the entire shared data directory to another computer in the network whenever he wants to. If for some reason the original poster wants to change his OS entirely he can just transfer the shared data files, do a complete clean install, and transfer the shared data files back.

What user convenience? If the user wants to organize his files, he can use directories. He won't have to worry about which parbreastion has more available space.

Why, exactly, in this user's particular situation?

Well, excuse me for being familiar with Debian, which is what the original poster wants to use.

It's obvious he hadn't actually tried installing Debian yet, since Debian's guided parbreastioning would have by default offered to split it something like this:

5000mb - 700mb - swap 6000mb -home

Contrast this with what the original poster asked about:

50mb -boot 4000mb - 512mb - swap 5638mb -usr

This is nothing like the default "Debian way".

I use Debian for all of my file servers and workstations, so I have some idea of what's convenient and how much space stuff takes up. The Debian installer is very conservative, ensuring plenty of room for practically any amount of installed software (the parbreastioning step takes place before any package selection). Even with a sloppy full graphical desktop install, 2.5gigs is plenty of space for the entire OS (including home).

Isaac Kuo