[svlug] question re partitioning system

[Darlene Wallach]

Joe,

Thank you very much for your thoughtful reply and suggestions!
Greatly appreciated.


Joe Brenner wrote:

> Darlene Wallach <wallachd at earthlink.net> wrote: 
> 
>>I'm getting ready to install RedHat 7.2 on my system. I purchased my
>>computer from VA Linux Systems. It came with their modifications to
>>RedHat 6.2. It came with a 30 gig hard drive.
>>
> 
>>Since I'm upgrading to 7.2 I thought I should take the opportunity
>>to repartition my system. 
>>
> 
> And later Darlene Wallach <wallachd at earthlink.net> wrote: 
> 
> 
>>Are you suggesting that I choose ext2 over ext3?
>>
> 
> If you're asking for opinions, I would suggest sticking to
> ext2 for now.  ext3 will probably work fine, but ext2 
> definitely will.  The primary difference is that if you do 
> an abrupt shutdown (e.g. power failure) ext2 will insist on 
> spending some time on checking the disk when you restart the
> system.  Ext3 doesn't need to. 
> 
> But there are some occasional (but thankfully rare) reports
> of disk corruption with the new ext3 system.  
> 
> 
>>What are the differences between GRUB and LILO? Are there advantages of
>>one over the other?
>>
> 
> Once again, lilo is older and will definitely work.  Grub is
> newer and will probably work (I think it's been in use on
> Mandrake for some time). If I remember right, it's main
> advantage is that it looks prettier. 
> 
> When I did a RedHat 7.2 installation, I ran into trouble,
> and tried again with more conservative choices, and got it
> to work.  My guess is that the graphical installer was
> giving me trouble, and the text-based option works better. 
> However, it *could* be that Grub was having trouble for some
> reason with my old scsi card and scsi drives.  
> 
> In general, my experience with RedHat has been that they
> like to make new, whizzy and quite buggy software the
> default and let newbies struggle with it, and even the *.2
> releases aren't perfectly safe these days.  So my advice is
> to be really conservative, stick with the older and better
> tested options as much as possible.
> 
> 
>>I should be able to use the upgrade option as opposed to new installation?
>>
> 
> I haven't tried to do it, but personally I wouldn't think
> so, not if you're planning on doing repartitioning.
> Shrinking a partition is a tricky business, as I remember
> it.  (By the way: you're not thinking about doing any of
> this without thoroughly backing up anything you don't want 
> to lose, right?)


I was planning on using tar and xcdroast to save things on cds.


> 
> 
>>It is currently laid out:
>>
>>$ df -k
>>Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
>>/dev/hda3              1517952   1336364    104476  93% /
>>/dev/hda1                23990      3475     19311  15% /boot
>>/dev/hda4             27432860   4409404  23023456  16% /home
>>
> 
> Ouch.  That looks hard to work with all right.  
> 
> I'm a big fan of small numbers of partitions these days.  
> Currently my box at home is just set-up like this:
> 
>    Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use%
>    Mounted on
>    /dev/hda5             12910920   5462916   6792152  45% /
>    /dev/hda1                23302      2361     19738  11% /boot
> 
> The trouble extra partitions is that you're dropping a wall 
> down on your disk that's going to be hard to move later if 
> you realize you got it in the wrong place.  
> 
> Looking at Rafael's recommendation:
> 
> Rafael <raffi at ark.linwin.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>>My recommendation:
>>/	150 MB
>>/usr	2-4.5 GB [1]
>>swap	RAM x 2, 1GB max.
>>/var	32 - 500 MB [2] 
>>/tmp	100 - 350 MB [3]
>>/home	the rest
>>/opt	[4]
>>
> 
> He's thought this through pretty carefully, but even so he
> has to stick in caveats in the form of things like that
> point [2] on /var.
> 
> But most users don't really want to think these things
> trough that carefully, and don't really know what they're
> going to be doing with their systems in the future.
> 
> For example, suppose you get interested in using the
> postgresql database?  Redhat puts the database files 
> under /var by default.  All of a sudden that 500Mb limit 
> might not be quite right...
> 
> Further, Rafael <raffi at ark.linwin.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>>In one case I had to manualy configure ethernet card (in rc script)
>>because it wouldn't take that from the default Redhat files. I exchanged
>>email with VA support and eventualy got response from Rick Moen, who has
>>good knowledge about VA linux systems.
>>
> 
> By the way, Rick Moen is generally tremdendously helpful
> with linux newbies, though he's unfortunately not hanging
> out on this list at the moment.  You might try asking
> questions on the balug mailing list some time... 
> 



That is a great suggestion. I didn't realize Rick wasn't on svlug
right now. Although I haven't seen his name for a while.


Darlene
wallachd at earthlink.net