Best partition scheme to use

[spline]

Hi all,

i installed Amahi recently.
As is want to server also to hold my backups from my workstation, i want to use greyhole as a aditional safety feature (ok, i have also other backups offsite).
I have currently one 1,5 TByte HD installed in the machine, but a will add another two 2 TByte HDDs if the server is up and running.
During installation of Fedore, i used the recommended partition schema (whole drive as one partition) plus a swap partition.

So, now the only partition i have in my storage pool ist "/" the root partition. As i understood, this should not be added to the storage pool.
So, I will install the whole stuff again and will change the partition scheme while installing Fedora.

Which is the recomended "Amahi"-style partitioning for the hda? Who do i have to setup this during installation?


Thanks and regards

spline

[nemowho]

I'm a day late and a dollar short! I have the EXACT same question as Spline. Brand new to Linux, I have no idea what I'm doing with these partitions, but want to maximize the space I'm giving to my media partitions. But overall goal is to replicate the functionality of MS Vail (including the Greyhole angle), but without the...um.... Vail part. Any sage advice here is appreciated!

[rgmhtt]

i play around with partitioning regularly. I have a set of opinions and goals.

FIrst you are limited to 4 partitions, LVM is your friend, kind of.

/boot MUST be its own partition, currently 500Mb is used and this is MORE than enough.

SWAP is by default dropped into your LVM partition, I like to have it as its own partition and twice my memory size. I think there is a practical limit around 8Gb (ie more than 4Gb of memory, little reason to continue doubling SWAP space).

So for starters, I select to replace the drive, but to review the changes. This gets me into Disk Druid. I proceed to delete the 2 partitions in the LVM partition, then delete the LVM partition. Now I have LOTS of free space.

I then create my SWAP partition as mentioned above.

The rest of the space I create as a single LVM partition. I change its label to something other than the default. This is important if you ever have to take it out and mount it on another system. BTW, I also select unique labels for each of the partitions created in the LVM partition below for the same reason (got burned bad on a recovery once this way).

There are 3 EXT4 partitions you need, minimally, in the LVM partition:

/
/home
/var/hda

/var/hda is where most of the Amahi stuff goes and your shares. You want it BIG.
/home is where user home shares are. Depending on how much user store there is, this determines the size of /home.
/ is for the system stuff. 12Gb CAN be considered a LOT of space for this. 20Gb should keep things going a long time.

CAVEAT: there is a problem with logrotate, and /var/log can grow large depending on services installed.

I am NOT a greyhole user and cannot add what it does here. I THINK it allows you to add another drive and extend /home and /var/hda for example. But you can do that generally with more LVM partitions on the new drives, but then you have to know some Linux tricks.

YMMV

[moredruid]

Usually I'm one of the first to reply to topics like these but since the introduction of Greyhole I'm a bit cautious. I manage my storage myself and have greyhole disabled (I don't trust it - yet).

If there is a logrotate issue this can be mitigated by some config changes (i.e. enable compression for starters).
my usual setup is like this:
partition 1 primary 1GB ext3 mounted on /boot
partition 2 primary <rest of disk> LVM

in LVM I create at least the following scheme:
5GB /
10GB /home
5GB /usr
5GB /var
5GB /tmp
2x <amount of RAM in GB> swap, starting from 8GB you might want to do 1.5 x RAM size, RedHat recommends an upper limit of 32GB unless you have very specific needs (and you wouldn't have asked a partition scheme in the first place )

for amahi I'd add
<rest of disk> /var/hda

With LVM you can easily add another disk to your volume group pool and extend any logical volume with the newly available disk space.

The concept of LVM can be a bit hard to grasp at first but once you're used to the flexibility it provides you don't want to go back (drive letters should be a thing of the past, at least from a user point of view).

[jayrock]

If you are going to use greyhold I think you shouldn't use LVM for your data because greyhole takes care of pooling the drives. I also think you should use the same partition names as in the default install, you never know how much Amahi applications rely on this.

In my latest install I did it like this.

- in the Fedora installation dialog: "use entire drive", and click "review and modifiy partition layout"
- Note down the proposed size for lv_swap (for instance, 5760), then delete LVM/VolGroup
- Delete the drive that's marked as physical volume (LVM) (for instance, Drives/dev/sda). DO NOT resize, there is a bug in Fedora installation that may make it crash
- Create a new partition, Mount Point stays empty, File System Type LVM, Size is now what ever you want to use, 30 GB works fine
- Select the new partition and click LVM
- Click Add on the lower right, use File System Type "swap", Logical Volume Name "lv_swap", and enter the size you noted down before
- Click Add again, use File System Type "ext4", Mount Point "/", Logical Volume Name "lv_root". Make sure you use all remaining space
- Back in the main dialog, under Hard Drives there is now a lot of free space. Click new, create a partition with file system "ext4", mount point "/var/hda/files", select "fill to maximum allowable size"

Works for me.

Cheers

jayrock

[jayrock]

Actually I had prepared a wiki page on this topic, see here: http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Partiti ... an_install

[ChrisVanBael]

Hi,

I'm trying to follow the wiki guideline on this, but shouldn't there be a /boot partition?
If I don't do that, then I get an error message that there should be a bootable partition.

Perhaps I missed it in the explanation.

[jayrock]

For me it works without a separate /boot partition. If this is a problem, I suggest to note down the proposed size of then /boot parition in the third step, and then create one after the eight step accordingly.

Hope that helps.

[rgmhtt]

Hi,

I'm trying to follow the wiki guideline on this, but shouldn't there be a /boot partition?
If I don't do that, then I get an error message that there should be a bootable partition.

Perhaps I missed it in the explanation.

You should always have a /boot partition. F14 is making this 500Mb, but TENDS to only use ~50Mb. This is for your own protection so that during a kernel update, you don't run out of disk space then end up with an unbootable system.

If you never run out of space in / and it never gets corrupted, you don't need a separate /boot partition...

[jayrock]

You should always have a /boot partition. F14 is making this 500Mb, but TENDS to only use ~50Mb. This is for your own protection so that during a kernel update, you don't run out of disk space then end up with an unbootable system.

If you never run out of space in / and it never gets corrupted, you don't need a separate /boot partition...

This is a bit confusing - when selecting "use entire disk" during Fedora install, it doesn't propose a boot patition, even on a 8 GB drive. Why?