Re: [gentoo-user] Mounting Question...

[Benjamen R. Meyer]

Dirk Heinrichs wrote:
> On Thursday 20 December 2007 10:50:33 Benjamen R. Meyer wrote:
>> I set up a server system a little while ago, and in performing updates
>> to portage it ran out of disk space as I didn't quite allow enough space
>> on the root partition (3.8 GB).
> That's way too much. 256M is enough.

/ is the primary drive for the OS; I typically only off-load to other
partitions for user stuff. On the server, I initially only offloaded
/home and /usr/local; but in the crisis of the "out of diskspace" issue,
I ended up also offloading /var/tmp and /usr/portage.

>> As a result, I took a partition that I had cleaned up (this was from a
>> rebuild of a system that was a different
>> distro in the past) and moved over /usr/portage to it. It's a 47 GB
>> partition (as reported by df -h) and the system works fine.
>> I do realize that if the mount command got screwed up, I'd probably have
>> issues recovering the system, but that is that system.
>> I am now thinking of converting my desktop over to Gentoo as well, and
>> was wondering whether what I did above on the server was wise or not.
> I think it is not. You'll undoubtedly get different answers about this,
> but IMHO it is best (regardless what kind of system) to use small,
> special purpose logical volumes. This way you can add space when needed,
> use the filesystem that fits best for the kind of data you store on this
> volume and have a certain degree of safety against volume corruption.
> Here is what I would recommend for a normal linux system:
> [hs]da1: /boot, 64M, ext2
> [hs]da2: /, 256M, ext3 or xfs
> [hs]da3: LVM
> Then, create a volume group spawning [hs]da3 with name vg00 (you can
> choose the name freely) and create logical volumes inside:
> /dev/vg00/swap: size as needed, swapfs # can be omitted if enough RAM
> /dev/vg00/usr: /usr, 2-5G (dep. on number of pkgs), ext3 or xfs
> /dev/vg00/var: /var, 512M-1G, ext3 or xfs
> For /home, I prefer to have one LV per user, like /dev/vg00/john_doe,
> /dev/vg00/jane_doe and have the kernel automounter mount them on demand
> (at login time).
>> I will be using the server as the portage provider for my desktop too.
>> Otherwise, what is the recommended space to have available for the
>> portage tree in /usr/portage so I can have root as an appropriately
>> sized partition?
> Here again, I use the kernel automounter to mount three different LVs
> under /gentoo when needed: /dev/vg00/build (5.5G to be able to build
> OO.org), /dev/vg00/distfiles for the source packages and
> /dev/vg00/overlays for overlays, incl. the portage tree.
> On the desktop machine, you should be able to mount distfiles and
> overlays from the server via NFS. The build volume I would leave locally
> on the desktop to get faster build times (unless your network connection
> to your server is faster than harddisc access).

I don't like using NFS much...guess I'll have to change that as I would
like to centralize my server as a one-stop shop for usernames and
passwords for the few systems on my network - server, desktop, and a
laptop at present, but there will also be a few others shortly too. The
laptop runs Windows 2k, so it'll just auth against Samba...any how...to
get back to this issue...

I haven't played with LVM yet. It's been something that's intrigued me,
but I haven't ever researched it much to play with it. What you guys
propose above and in this thread is quite interesting, so I'll follow up
with this question:

Right now I have the server configured per drives as follows:

/dev/hda1	/		 3.8 GB		  4096.19 MB
/dev/hda2	/home		15.0 GB		 15356.60 MB
/dev/hda3	SWAP		 2.6 GB		  2665.00 MB
/dev/hda4	/usr/local	 4.9 GB		  5255.96 MB

/dev/hdb1	EMPTY		66.3 GB		 67875.02 MB
/dev/hdb2	/var/tmp	28.0 GB		 30721.43 MB
/dev/hdb3	/usr/portage	47.0 GB		 51202.37 MB
/dev/hdb4	SWAP		10.0 GB		 10240.48 MB

It's only got a 192 MB of RAM - a PII/233, so I'm giving it generous
swap space. (My desktop is an AMD64 with  a gig of RAM.) I seem to have
a sizable partition free (hdb1), so this just might work - but how would
you guys propose I transition from the above setup to an LVM setup? All
partitions are currently ext3 (my preferred fs for linux).

I don't think I'd be able to do that on my desktop right now...namely in
that rebuilding it from Slackware to Gentoo is going to be trying
enough, but I think I can manage it - namely from the side of downtime,
but I'd also like to try to fully utilize the AMD64 in the system -
meaning 64-bit where possible. Any how...for now, I'd like to hear about
the LVM conversion for the server; I'll bring up the other issues later
in different threads when I have the time to address them, but the LVM
stuff is intriguing enough that I might be able to squeeze it in in
short order if I can do it without risking data, or having to rebuild
the system.

Thanks,

Ben
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