[vox] September Installfest Date?

[Tony Cratz]

Tony Cratz wrote:
> Brian Lavender wrote:
>>> I still have a hard time deciding how to go about the proper 
>>> partitioning of a system.
>> I have not found a clear method for partitioning.
>>
>> I have used lvm and ext2online to hot add space to a partition. The
>> advantage I see to partitioning is that some service won't kill the rest
>> of your system when it fills up /var or some user won't kill the mail
>> server when he fills up /home . But then you could argue that two
>> competing resources for /var could compete against each other. Or, you
>> want to preserve /usr/local on reinstall. Or, why not just put it in one
>> partition?
> 
> 
> 	You are kind of jumping the gun on this and it is something
> 	I'm sure we could spend hours on covering. But let me kind
> 	of give a few guide lines.
> 
> 	1) Know what your system will be used for.


	Damn, I knew I forgot to mention a couple of things.

	If your system is not a server (personal desktop or laptop) or
	it has a small drive (under 100 Gigs) it might just be easier
	to go with the default partitions. Or you don't really
	know your system that well (or you are just plain lazy)
	it might be better not to partition. After all your not looking
	for any real performance boast or trying to keep a partition
	from filling the whole drive.

	But if you are doing something where you developing code
	on your laptop, or you are doing a number of virtual machines
	or developing a database system or need to have an encrypted
	file system,  you just might want to break the drive into
	partitions. And it is possible if you move swap to the center
	of the drive instead of the default position you just may
	increase the speed of your laptop drive while you are
	protecting the rest of the system. All of this comes under
	the 'know your system' area I mention in my last E-mail.

	So for someone like Brian who uses VMs and have person data
	as well as work related data on his laptop it just might
	be a good idea for him to break his kind of small drive
	(what size was it? 200 Gig?) into smaller slices.

	BTW I realize that for some of us at one time a large drive
	was 10 Gigs. Well time has change and it is very hard to buy
	an ATA drive under 500 Gigs for a home system. Therefore
	100 Gigs and 200 Gigs are on the small size now.

	Now you should be able to understand some of the pros and
	cons of disk partitioning.


							Tony