Linux 4 – Hard Disk Layout

• Partitons and Disk
• Filesystems
• mount points
• swap space
• design considerations

Important folders in Linux

/boot → (about 100MB+ is fine) for kernel, initrd
can not be read if software raid is present
/home → user related folders & files, configuration files, etc
/etc  → configuration files, system wide
/root → root’s home directory, could also be kept on a separate device
/var  → log files, webserver will keep files, db also, system, etc.
/opt  → this is where a lot of 3rd party stuff goes
/usr  → binary programs, that are generally not written to a lot
SWAP  → nice to have some

Any of thse folders can be mounted on different harddrives

How to design different partitions and mounts:

A basic system (desktop machine)

/boot

/

swap

The / is the root parition

• / is biggest
• /boot
• 100MB+ will hold a couple of kernel revisions and GRUB configuration files
• some older GNU/Linux distributions don’t support multi-terabyte
• modern OS do not neet a separate parition for this
• needs to be the first paritition
• swap
• general rule of thumb is 1 to 2 times the ammount of RAM
• similar to the paging file in Windows

A network workstation

• /
• usually local harddrive
• /boot
• separate partition or not depends on OS, hardware, policies
• /home
• This can be a NFS file server, mount over SMB or SSH
• Needs to be very fast as a lot of traffic will go here
• swap

Server Setup

• /
• mounted on a local hdd
• /home
• mounted from somewhere else, or either local, or fast SSD
• /var
• own HDD/SSD, very fast, a lot of use, separate if possible
• /usr
• can be on a slower drive, mounted on a network as a readonly

 

---