Partitioning for Server installation 5

[samsonx]

I have been asked to assist with setting up a RedHat server at my work because of my Linux background. I am relatively good, however I have never done any work with Networking and Servers. I have a couple of questions:

1. What is a good partition set-up for a server (Any links to websites also appreciated)?

2. What are some good sites that explain (or have tutorials) on Samba and Networking?

Stars all round for good responses.

Cheers,

Samson

 

[thedaver]

1) Partition for a server... Not-specific enough in your question, but I'll try to infer because you wanted to run Samba. If you are going to have a large shared space that is common for all users to work within, then simply make a seperate partition and call it what you like.

If you want to give each user a finite amount of space in their home directory, then you should create a larger /home partition with 2X your current per-user disk quota.

Example, 50 users, current quota=50MB. Current partition size required, 2.5GB. 2Xcurrent = 5GB. This leaves you room to grow as users exceed their bounds - which they will and they'll expect you to produce the new quota space immediately!

2)

http://www.samba.org

Surfinbox.com Business Internet Services - National Dialup, DSL, T-1 and more.

http://www.surfinbox.com/business/

 

[RhythmAce]

If this is going to be a server, then partitioning should be very straight forward. Most of the later distros will automatically partition the drive(s) for you during install. There will be 3 partitions, /swap, /boot and / (called root). The root partition will hold all the directories and other mount points you add later. If you have shared folders on you win boxes, linux will see them. All you have to do is create a mount point for that folder. For example, if it is a shared folder on Joe's machine, you can create a mount point (directory) called /joe. What would be mounted there would be the share name i.e. //joe/shared_folder. Now you would access it just like any other dir on your server. Things are a little different the other way around though because windows doesn't read linux partitions. Enter Samba. With Samba you will create shares. This is a little more complicated than windows shares but there are a few GUI programs out there that will make setting things up a lot easier. SWAT is one that comes to mind. If you would like an all around GUI for helping set up your servers, take a look at webmin you can find it at

http://www.webmin.com

It comes it two flavors, a tarball that you build yourself or the good ol' rpm version. You can acces it from any browser. However, I find that the Files Manager module doesn't work with Mozilla. Sorry I couldn't get more specific but I'm late for work. Good luck on the new server.

 

[skiflyer]

IMO servers should always have a separate partition for logs as well.

It makes it good and easy to just point all your programs to
/logs/whatever

and if something starts to go wrong and a process dumps to log you don't have to worry about filling up your hard drive.

-Rob

 

[samsonx]

Thanks all...I going to get started shortly, now I have some things to think about.

 

[MrTom]

I usually just create machines with a root partition and nothing else. Modern disk sizes and journaled file systems reduce the worries as to what can go wrong.

Basically, not worrying about it saves you time. Presumably you'll have a back up solution, so you should never loose (much) data and if the service is that important you should have a failover box anyway. However, monitoring of disk usage is good practice.

On a file server, using quotas will help you prevent full disks. In this case the users should be your only real worry.

 

[zeland]

My own setup for my office file server is:

/dev/sda (9GB):
sda1 as / (5GB)
sda2 as /var (3GB)
sda4 as extended
sda5 as swap (1GB)

/dev/sdb (18GB), /dev/sdc (18GB), /dev/sdd (18GB) in (RAID5):
md0 as /home (32GB with user quota 200MB/user for 20 users & /home/pub subfolder for general purpose global sharing)