request for some server config advice (warning - kinda long)

[Mike Bird]

On Thu, 2005-10-13 at 17:39, volvoguy wrote:
> Any suggestions/opinions/comments would be appreciated.

If you have a modern motherboard, don't need to apply quotas, don't need
two or more root partitions to experiment with different distros, don't
have multiple servers with /usr shared via NFS, and don't need to mount
some filesystems readonly or noexec or nosuid or nodev for additional
security, then you only need a root partition and swap. However, with
LVM over RAID1 you can have resilience and flexibility without much up
front effort.

I always create a /boot partition at the front of the disk in case I
ever need to boot the disk on a motherboard that can't boot from a large
partition.  30MB is probably sufficient but we generally use 100MB as
space is cheap and we don't want to ever have to grow that partition.  I
almost always use two identical disks so the /boot is RAID-1 across both
drives and our lilo.conf contains:

  boot=/dev/md0
  raid-extra-boot=mbr-only

You'll need a swap partition.  I create one on each drive.  Each swap
partition is two to four times RAM size.  They are not RAID.

For a simple setup, just use the rest of the drive for your root
paritition.  However, if you want maximum flexibility, here's what you
can do:

Create a root partition of 10-20GB depending upon how much stuff you
install.  Ideally this should again be RAID-1 across two identical
drives.  Then make the rest of your space into an LVM physical volume. 
You can later carve this up into as many partitions as you want, resize
them at will, mount them with strange flags and quotas and experimental
filesystems or whatever takes your fancy.  Ideally, this LVM physical
volume should also be RAID-1 across two identical drives.

Some people RAID-1 all their drives and make a single LVM PV from which
they carve everything including /boot and /.  I prefer to have /, /boot,
and swap outside LVM so I can use those to fix things if LVM should ever
get hosed.

Note that LILO has problems with kernel upgrades when /boot is RAID-1
under Hoary.  I don't know whether Breezy has fixed this.

--Mike Bird