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Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup?

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  Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? "gajuph4pre@yahoo.com" <gajuph4pre@yahoo.com> - 2020-07-28 23:20 +0200
    Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Roberto C. Sánchez <roberto@debian.org> - 2020-07-28 23:30 +0200
    Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2020-07-28 23:30 +0200
      Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Andrew Cater <amacater@gmail.com> - 2020-07-29 00:00 +0200
        Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2020-07-29 00:30 +0200
          Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Andrew Cater <amacater@gmail.com> - 2020-07-29 00:50 +0200
            Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? "gajuph4pre@yahoo.com" <gajuph4pre@yahoo.com> - 2020-07-29 01:40 +0200
            Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Keith Bainbridge <ke1th3216@gmail.com> - 2020-07-29 03:30 +0200
          Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Keith bainbridge <keithrbau@gmail.com> - 2020-07-29 02:30 +0200
        Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? "gajuph4pre@yahoo.com" <gajuph4pre@yahoo.com> - 2020-07-29 01:40 +0200
      Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? "gajuph4pre@yahoo.com" <gajuph4pre@yahoo.com> - 2020-07-29 01:40 +0200
        Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2020-07-29 03:40 +0200
          Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? "gajuph4pre@yahoo.com" <gajuph4pre@yahoo.com> - 2020-07-29 05:30 +0200
            Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2020-07-29 13:40 +0200
              Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Andrew Cater <amacater@gmail.com> - 2020-07-29 13:50 +0200
                Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? "gajuph4pre@yahoo.com" <gajuph4pre@yahoo.com> - 2020-07-29 15:50 +0200
                  Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Hans <hans.ullrich@loop.de> - 2020-07-29 16:00 +0200
              Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? rhkramer@gmail.com - 2020-07-29 14:40 +0200
              Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? rhkramer@gmail.com - 2020-07-29 14:40 +0200
      Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? "gajuph4pre@yahoo.com" <gajuph4pre@yahoo.com> - 2020-07-29 01:40 +0200
        Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2020-07-29 03:50 +0200
          Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? "gajuph4pre@yahoo.com" <gajuph4pre@yahoo.com> - 2020-07-29 05:40 +0200
            Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2020-07-29 14:10 +0200
    Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> - 2020-07-29 08:20 +0200
    Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net> - 2020-07-29 16:00 +0200
      Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Daniel Barclay <danielbarclay.oss@gmail.com> - 2020-08-10 17:50 +0200
    Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Henning Follmann <hfollmann@itcfollmann.com> - 2020-07-29 17:30 +0200
      Re: Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup? Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> - 2020-07-30 08:20 +0200

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#225440 — Are the assigned capacities sufficient for my setup?

I have manually partitioned my hard disk drive as follows:

/boot is assigned 200MB
/root is assigned 10GB
/swap is assigned 20GB
/home is assigned 35GB
/var is assigned 10GB
/usr is assigned 5GB
/usr-local is assigned 5GB
/opt is assigned 5GB
/srv is assigned 5GB

In terms of capacity, which of the above partitions are over-provisioned?

Which of the above are under-provisioned?

Below are the essential information on my machine:

Intel i3-1005G1 CPU
4GB DDR4-2666MHz RAM onboard
250GB SSD
No discreet graphics card
Machine not used for gaming or creative design work

I welcome your feedback.

Regards.

Alan

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#225441

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 08:53:57PM +0000, gajuph4pre@yahoo.com wrote:
> I have manually partitioned my hard disk drive as follows:
> 
> /boot is assigned 200MB
> /root is assigned 10GB
> /swap is assigned 20GB
> /home is assigned 35GB
> /var is assigned 10GB
> /usr is assigned 5GB
> /usr-local is assigned 5GB
> /opt is assigned 5GB
> /srv is assigned 5GB
> 
> In terms of capacity, which of the above partitions are over-provisioned?
> 
> Which of the above are under-provisioned?
> 
> Below are the essential information on my machine:
> 
> Intel i3-1005G1 CPU
> 4GB DDR4-2666MHz RAM onboard
> 250GB SSD
> No discreet graphics card
> Machine not used for gaming or creative design work
> 
There isn't enough information to really say whether your sizing is
appropriate.  However, I would recommend making /boot at least 1 GB and
20 GB swap seems massive overkill.  For swap, 1x - 2x system RAM is
recommended, though if you intend to significantly increase RAM, then 20
GB might be OK.  For the rest, as long as you are using LVM, the initial
sizing isn't so important, as it is trivially easy to resize the logical
volumes and their filesystems to be larger as needed.

Regards,

-Roberto

-- 
Roberto C. Sánchez

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#225442

gajuph4pre@yahoo.com wrote: 
> I have manually partitioned my hard disk drive as follows:
> 
> /boot is assigned 200MB
> /root is assigned 10GB
> /swap is assigned 20GB
> /home is assigned 35GB
> /var is assigned 10GB
> /usr is assigned 5GB
> /usr-local is assigned 5GB
> /opt is assigned 5GB
> /srv is assigned 5GB
> 
> In terms of capacity, which of the above partitions are over-provisioned?
> 

All of them, none of them. These are the sorts of hard
assignments I expect from the UNIX Systems Administrator
Handbook, circa 1997 and Solaris.

My recommendation:

/       100 GB
/home   100 GB
swap 1 GB
optionally, /var 20 GB.

You don't need a separate /boot unless you're running an odd
filesystem for root.

You don't need more swap than 1 GB because any use of swap after
the kernel settles things down (say, ten minutes after boot)
means that you need more RAM. And you don't really need more
RAM.

You don't need a separate /usr or /usr/local or /opt or /srv
under any conditions. That differentiation comes from a time
when disks were tens of megabytes.

You only need a separate /var if you think you're going to fill
up log space or similar without noticing. logrotate is pretty
standard these days.

-dsr-

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#225445

[Multipart message — attachments visible in raw view] — view raw

To be honest, on 256G - when you don't know what you want - I'd be inclined
to take the guided partitioning all in one partition layout as a good
start. Logs rotate these days, downloads can be deleted. If you know you're
going to be running lots of things in one particular partition, that's
slightly different - I have 6TB as a dedicated LVM volume under /srv here
in one machine because there's a local Linux mirror across my desk, but
that's exceptional

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:23 PM Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> wrote:

> gajuph4pre@yahoo.com wrote:
> > I have manually partitioned my hard disk drive as follows:
> >
> > /boot is assigned 200MB
> > /root is assigned 10GB
> > /swap is assigned 20GB
> > /home is assigned 35GB
> > /var is assigned 10GB
> > /usr is assigned 5GB
> > /usr-local is assigned 5GB
> > /opt is assigned 5GB
> > /srv is assigned 5GB
> >
> > In terms of capacity, which of the above partitions are over-provisioned?
> >
>
> All of them, none of them. These are the sorts of hard
> assignments I expect from the UNIX Systems Administrator
> Handbook, circa 1997 and Solaris.
>
> My recommendation:
>
> /       100 GB
> /home   100 GB
> swap 1 GB
> optionally, /var 20 GB.
>
> You don't need a separate /boot unless you're running an odd
> filesystem for root.
>
> You don't need more swap than 1 GB because any use of swap after
> the kernel settles things down (say, ten minutes after boot)
> means that you need more RAM. And you don't really need more
> RAM.
>
> You don't need a separate /usr or /usr/local or /opt or /srv
> under any conditions. That differentiation comes from a time
> when disks were tens of megabytes.
>
> You only need a separate /var if you think you're going to fill
> up log space or similar without noticing. logrotate is pretty
> standard these days.
>
> -dsr-
>
>

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#225446

Andrew Cater wrote: 
> To be honest, on 256G - when you don't know what you want - I'd be inclined
> to take the guided partitioning all in one partition layout as a good
> start. Logs rotate these days, downloads can be deleted. If you know you're
> going to be running lots of things in one particular partition, that's
> slightly different - I have 6TB as a dedicated LVM volume under /srv here
> in one machine because there's a local Linux mirror across my desk, but
> that's exceptional

It's not a bad choice, but a separate home has made any number
of upgrades and experiments much more bearable to me. Backups,
too, of course.

-dsr-

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#225447

[Multipart message — attachments visible in raw view] — view raw

The only other thing I'd add - if you're planning to dual boot a machine -
allow both operating systems enough space. The machine on which I'm typing
this has a 256G disk. It came to me with Windows 10 and I retained a
Windows partition to do manufacturer's updates and so on. I gave the
Windows partition 30G and thought that would be fine. Not so: I had to
resize the partition after the fact and 40G has proved fine. Fortunately, I
had no data to save but it's worth thinking about.

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 10:22 PM Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> wrote:

> Andrew Cater wrote:
> > To be honest, on 256G - when you don't know what you want - I'd be
> inclined
> > to take the guided partitioning all in one partition layout as a good
> > start. Logs rotate these days, downloads can be deleted. If you know
> you're
> > going to be running lots of things in one particular partition, that's
> > slightly different - I have 6TB as a dedicated LVM volume under /srv here
> > in one machine because there's a local Linux mirror across my desk, but
> > that's exceptional
>
> It's not a bad choice, but a separate home has made any number
> of upgrades and experiments much more bearable to me. Backups,
> too, of course.
>
> -dsr-
>

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#225456

Based on my experience, a full install of Microsoft Windows 10 Pro consumes about 28.8GB of disk space.




On Wednesday, July 29, 2020, 6:45:55 AM GMT+8, Andrew Cater <amacater@gmail.com> wrote: 





The only other thing I'd add - if you're planning to dual boot a machine - allow both operating systems enough space. The machine on which I'm typing this has a 256G disk. It came to me with Windows 10 and I retained a Windows partition to do manufacturer's updates and so on. I gave the Windows partition 30G and thought that would be fine. Not so: I had to resize the partition after the fact and 40G has proved fine. Fortunately, I had no data to save but it's worth thinking about. 

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 10:22 PM Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> wrote:
> Andrew Cater wrote: 
>> To be honest, on 256G - when you don't know what you want - I'd be inclined
>> to take the guided partitioning all in one partition layout as a good
>> start. Logs rotate these days, downloads can be deleted. If you know you're
>> going to be running lots of things in one particular partition, that's
>> slightly different - I have 6TB as a dedicated LVM volume under /srv here
>> in one machine because there's a local Linux mirror across my desk, but
>> that's exceptional
> 
> It's not a bad choice, but a separate home has made any number
> of upgrades and experiments much more bearable to me. Backups,
> too, of course.
> 
> -dsr-
> 

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#225459

On 29/7/20 8:45 am, Andrew Cater wrote:
> The only other thing I'd add - if you're planning to dual boot a machine 
> - allow both operating systems enough space. The machine on which I'm 
> typing this has a 256G disk. It came to me with Windows 10 and I 
> retained a Windows partition to do manufacturer's updates and so on. I 
> gave the Windows partition 30G and thought that would be fine. Not so: I 
> had to resize the partition after the fact and 40G has proved fine. 
> Fortunately, I had no data to save but it's worth thinking about.


40G seems like a minimum. I think win needs more space than shows when 
closed to work. Swap files spring to mind.

-- 
Keith Bainbridge

keith.bainbridge.3216@gmail.com

0447 667 468

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#225458

On 29/7/20 8:22 am, Dan Ritter wrote:
> Andrew Cater wrote:
>> To be honest, on 256G - when you don't know what you want - I'd be inclined
>> to take the guided partitioning all in one partition layout as a good
>> start. Logs rotate these days, downloads can be deleted. If you know you're
>> going to be running lots of things in one particular partition, that's
>> slightly different - I have 6TB as a dedicated LVM volume under /srv here
>> in one machine because there's a local Linux mirror across my desk, but
>> that's exceptional
> 
> It's not a bad choice, but a separate home has made any number
> of upgrades and experiments much more bearable to me. Backups,
> too, of course.
> 
> -dsr-
> 


+1


-- 

Keith Bainbridge

keithrbau@gmail.com

0447 667468

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#225454

Andrew,

I can't take the guided partitioning route because I use my hard disk drive to dual boot with Microsoft Windows 10.






On Wednesday, July 29, 2020, 5:53:01 AM GMT+8, Andrew Cater <amacater@gmail.com> wrote: 





To be honest, on 256G - when you don't know what you want - I'd be inclined to take the guided partitioning all in one partition layout as a good start. Logs rotate these days, downloads can be deleted. If you know you're going to be running lots of things in one particular partition, that's slightly different - I have 6TB as a dedicated LVM volume under /srv here in one machine because there's a local Linux mirror across my desk, but that's exceptional

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:23 PM Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> wrote:
> gajuph4pre@yahoo.com wrote: 
>> I have manually partitioned my hard disk drive as follows:
>> 
>> /boot is assigned 200MB
>> /root is assigned 10GB
>> /swap is assigned 20GB
>> /home is assigned 35GB
>> /var is assigned 10GB
>> /usr is assigned 5GB
>> /usr-local is assigned 5GB
>> /opt is assigned 5GB
>> /srv is assigned 5GB
>> 
>> In terms of capacity, which of the above partitions are over-provisioned?
>> 
> 
> All of them, none of them. These are the sorts of hard
> assignments I expect from the UNIX Systems Administrator
> Handbook, circa 1997 and Solaris.
> 
> My recommendation:
> 
> /       100 GB
> /home   100 GB
> swap 1 GB
> optionally, /var 20 GB.
> 
> You don't need a separate /boot unless you're running an odd
> filesystem for root.
> 
> You don't need more swap than 1 GB because any use of swap after
> the kernel settles things down (say, ten minutes after boot)
> means that you need more RAM. And you don't really need more
> RAM.
> 
> You don't need a separate /usr or /usr/local or /opt or /srv
> under any conditions. That differentiation comes from a time
> when disks were tens of megabytes.
> 
> You only need a separate /var if you think you're going to fill
> up log space or similar without noticing. logrotate is pretty
> standard these days.
> 
> -dsr-
> 
> 

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#225453

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your recommendations.

My hard disk drive is used to dual boot Microsoft Windows with Debian. Secure Boot is enabled in the BIOS.

I assigned 100GB for Debian 10.4.

About your statement: "You don't need a separate /boot unless you're running an odd filesystem for root."

I don't want Debian to install the Grub bootloader onto the space occupied by Windows bootloader. I had an unpleasant experience when I installed Microsoft Windows 10 first followed by Debian Buster. I was unable to boot into Microsoft Windows OS. That's why I dedicated a discreet partition for Debian called /boot.

For your information, I use GPT (GUID Partition Table) on UEFI firmware. MBR and legacy BIOS are behind me now.

Based on your recommendations, I only need the partitions named below:

/root
/home
/swap
(optional) /var

May I know why you provision 100GB of disk space to the root partition?

Regards.

Alan




On Wednesday, July 29, 2020, 5:22:46 AM GMT+8, Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> wrote: 





gajuph4pre@yahoo.com wrote: 
> I have manually partitioned my hard disk drive as follows:
> 
> /boot is assigned 200MB
> /root is assigned 10GB
> /swap is assigned 20GB
> /home is assigned 35GB
> /var is assigned 10GB
> /usr is assigned 5GB
> /usr-local is assigned 5GB
> /opt is assigned 5GB
> /srv is assigned 5GB
> 
> In terms of capacity, which of the above partitions are over-provisioned?
> 

All of them, none of them. These are the sorts of hard
assignments I expect from the UNIX Systems Administrator
Handbook, circa 1997 and Solaris.

My recommendation:

/      100 GB
/home  100 GB
swap 1 GB
optionally, /var 20 GB.

You don't need a separate /boot unless you're running an odd
filesystem for root.

You don't need more swap than 1 GB because any use of swap after
the kernel settles things down (say, ten minutes after boot)
means that you need more RAM. And you don't really need more

RAM.


You don't need a separate /usr or /usr/local or /opt or /srv
under any conditions. That differentiation comes from a time
when disks were tens of megabytes.

You only need a separate /var if you think you're going to fill
up log space or similar without noticing. logrotate is pretty
standard these days.

-dsr-

[toc] | [prev] | [next] | [standalone]

#225460

gajuph4pre@yahoo.com wrote: 
> 
> About your statement: "You don't need a separate /boot unless you're running an odd filesystem for root."
> 
> I don't want Debian to install the Grub bootloader onto the space occupied by Windows bootloader. I had an unpleasant experience when I installed Microsoft Windows 10 first followed by Debian Buster. I was unable to boot into Microsoft Windows OS. That's why I dedicated a discreet partition for Debian called /boot.

Fair enough. I wasn't considering a mixed boot environment.

> Based on your recommendations, I only need the partitions named below:
> 
> /root
> /home
> /swap
> (optional) /var
> 
> May I know why you provision 100GB of disk space to the root partition?

More to the point, I'm allocating 100GB of a notional 250 to
/home, and most of the rest to /. / will have everything in it
except your personal data; /var, /srv, and so forth all fall
under it.

If you have 100GB total, I would put about 40G to / and 60 to
/home.

-dsr-

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#225464

Hello Dan,

You wrote: / will have everything in it except your personal data; /var, /srv, and so forth all fall under it.

Sorry for the noob question but what does /home contain?






On Wednesday, July 29, 2020, 9:36:47 AM GMT+8, Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> wrote: 





gajuph4pre@yahoo.com wrote: 
> 
> About your statement: "You don't need a separate /boot unless you're running an odd filesystem for root."
> 
> I don't want Debian to install the Grub bootloader onto the space occupied by Windows bootloader. I had an unpleasant experience when I installed Microsoft Windows 10 first followed by Debian Buster. I was unable to boot into Microsoft Windows OS. That's why I dedicated a discreet partition for Debian called /boot.

Fair enough. I wasn't considering a mixed boot environment.

> Based on your recommendations, I only need the partitions named below:
> 
> /root
> /home
> /swap
> (optional) /var
> 
> May I know why you provision 100GB of disk space to the root partition?

More to the point, I'm allocating 100GB of a notional 250 to
/home, and most of the rest to /. / will have everything in it
except your personal data; /var, /srv, and so forth all fall
under it.

If you have 100GB total, I would put about 40G to / and 60 to

/home.

-dsr-

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#225480

gajuph4pre@yahoo.com wrote: 
> Hello Dan,
> 
> You wrote: / will have everything in it except your personal data; /var, /srv, and so forth all fall under it.
> 
> Sorry for the noob question but what does /home contain?

That's where each user's personal data is stored, and if you
open a terminal, the default first location:
/home/gajuph4pre, /home/dsr, etc.


-dsr-

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#225481

[Multipart message — attachments visible in raw view] — view raw

You _can_ use guided partitioning as a guide. Use Windows to reduce the
amount of space it takes on the disk. Use Windows tools to format the
second half of the disk, or whatever to vfat. Boot Debian: use Debian to
delete the vfat partition and create blank space: then use "use largest
blank space" and guided partition. Debian will recognise there's another OS
there and will insert the appropriate booting magic into a GPT formatted
disk with UEFI. I have (at least) one laptop here with exactly that
configuration.

If you're not sure, can I recommend Raphael Hertzog's Debian handbook -
which has just been released for Debian 10. See planet.debian.org recently.
Download and read it in slower time.

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 11:35 AM Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> wrote:

> gajuph4pre@yahoo.com wrote:
> > Hello Dan,
> >
> > You wrote: / will have everything in it except your personal data; /var,
> /srv, and so forth all fall under it.
> >
> > Sorry for the noob question but what does /home contain?
>
> That's where each user's personal data is stored, and if you
> open a terminal, the default first location:
> /home/gajuph4pre, /home/dsr, etc.
>
>
> -dsr-
>
>

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#225492

Hi Dan

There's a distro called Parted Magic which is based on Slack. The partitioning tool used by Parted Magic is gparted

Two questions:

(1) Can I use gparted to format any disk space to vfat?

(2) Why has it to be vfat and not some other filesystem such as amigo or macOS?

Regards.

Alan

P.S.: Thanks for your recommendation of Hetzog's guide.






On Wednesday, July 29, 2020, 7:48:50 PM GMT+8, Andrew Cater <amacater@gmail.com> wrote: 





You _can_ use guided partitioning as a guide. Use Windows to reduce the amount of space it takes on the disk. Use Windows tools to format the second half of the disk, or whatever to vfat. Boot Debian: use Debian to delete the vfat partition and create blank space: then use "use largest blank space" and guided partition. Debian will recognise there's another OS there and will insert the appropriate booting magic into a GPT formatted disk with UEFI. I have (at least) one laptop here with exactly that configuration.

If you're not sure, can I recommend Raphael Hertzog's Debian handbook - which has just been released for Debian 10. See planet.debian.org recently. Download and read it in slower time.

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 11:35 AM Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> wrote:
> gajuph4pre@yahoo.com wrote: 
>> Hello Dan,
>> 
>> You wrote: / will have everything in it except your personal data; /var, /srv, and so forth all fall under it.
>> 
>> Sorry for the noob question but what does /home contain?
> 
> That's where each user's personal data is stored, and if you
> open a terminal, the default first location:
> /home/gajuph4pre, /home/dsr, etc.
> 
> 
> -dsr-
> 
> 

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#225494

[Multipart message — attachments visible in raw view] — view raw

Am Mittwoch, 29. Juli 2020, 15:23:54 CEST schrieb gajuph4pre@yahoo.com:
> Hi Dan
> 
> There's a distro called Parted Magic which is based on Slack. The
> partitioning tool used by Parted Magic is gparted
> 
> Two questions:
> 
> (1) Can I use gparted to format any disk space to vfat?
> 
Yes, you can.


> (2) Why has it to be vfat and not some other filesystem such as amigo or
> macOS?
> 

You can use what filesystem you want, but vfat is the one, that also Windows 
will understand.

> Regards.
> 
> Alan
> 
> P.S.: Thanks for your recommendation of Hetzog's guide.
> 
> 
Best

Hans

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#225486

On Wednesday, July 29, 2020 08:35:33 AM rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:
> <darn I meant to say something else, but the train left the station>

Oh, I just meant to say that there are ways to see those hidden files.

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#225489

On Wednesday, July 29, 2020 07:35:16 AM Dan Ritter wrote:
> gajuph4pre@yahoo.com wrote:
> > Hello Dan,
> > 
> > You wrote: / will have everything in it except your personal data; /var,
> > /srv, and so forth all fall under it.
> > 
> > Sorry for the noob question but what does /home contain?
> 
> That's where each user's personal data is stored, and if you
> open a terminal, the default first location:
> /home/gajuph4pre, /home/dsr, etc.

I'll mention one of my personal prejudices:

You home directory, which might be /home/gajuph4pre (aside: I'd suggest you 
pick a shorter user name just to minimize typing) contains at least two types 
of data, maybe even 3, but I'd have to remind myself of the third):

   * what I think Dan is calling your application data (but which I tend to 
call "real user data", things that in Windows (and Debian) you'd find in 
directories like Documents, Photos, ...  These will be visible directories and 
files.

   * (personal) application configuration data -- in general, settings (in 
files) you've made or changed for applications to make them work slightly 
differently than the normal settings (that's not a good description, but it's 
what I can think of atm).  These directories and files are not visible, they 
are described as hidden, and the way files are hidden in linux is by prefixing 
the file name (or the directory name) with a period.  

(Aside: If a directory is hidden (prefixed with a period) all the files and 
(sub)directories below that directory are hidden (by virtue of the containing 
directory being hidden).

I find that confusing and hazardous (I made a mistake once that lost all my 
"real user data").  Most people seem to avoid mistakes like that, but I moved 
(and keep) all my "real user data" under visible top-level directories, for 
example:

Your home directory might be /home/gajuph4pre.  By default, your configuration 
settings go there (and I found it hard to change all of those defaults).

I would create a top level directory named /gajuph4pre and store all my "real 
user data" there.  You do have to change some settings (or move directories) 
in various locations to first put the folders like Documents, Photos, etc. 
there and then change defaults in various applications to save their "real 
user data" (e.g., documents that I create, photos I take (or download), ...) 
to that directory.

Back in the day, there were some applications (generally really low level 
stuff, maybe some editors that ran from the CLI that I could not find the way to 
(easily) change the default storage location.

I guess I should say that this works well for me as a single user.  On a 
multi-user machine with lots of users, you might proliferate a lot of top 
level directories, and possibly even interfere with some "system" directores 
(e.g., users named var, usr, dev or such would need special considerations).

Still I feel much more comfortable this way.

(Aside: I also felt like a 2nd class citizen when my top level directory was 
like /home/gajuph4pre instead of like /gajuph4pre ;-)

I guess I should mention that using /home/gajuph4pre does have some 
advantages, and I won't think of or mention them all here -- one is the 
shortcuts to refer to your home directory from the CLI, e.g., like ~.

The third category of data, I might as well try to suss this out (at least 
thinking out loud in words) -- some applications create things like indexes 
and such for various reasons -- at least some of these (for a specific user) 
are stored as hidden files or directories under you home directory.

I don't worry about losing those, because, if I did delete or corrupt them 
somehow, they are easily recreated -- most often the applications themselves 
will recreate them if they are missing (or note if they are corrupted or not 
complete and often give you an option to regenerate them).

The configuration settings in ~ are certainly important and can be a pain to 
recreate if you lose them, but, on the other hand, if you upgrade to a new 
version of Debian ("in place") some of those settings will be either 
inapplicable or counter productive.  When I switch to a new distro, I prefer 
to try it with the default configurations, and then make changes when I run 
into problems.

Because you are a newbie, the idea of a separate top level /gajuph4pre 
directory is probably more complication than it is worth.   Something to keep 
in mind for the future, maybe.

Oh, maybe to state my objection to mixing all those types of data in one 
directory, with one (or two) of those types being invisible (normally) more 
clearly, it just seems like a recipe for disaster (and I managed to follow it 
once, but avoided it ever since by creating a new top level directory as 
described (looking for some wood to knock on)).

<darn I meant to say something else, but the train left the station>

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#225455

Hi Dan,

You wrote: "You don't need a separate /usr or /usr/local or /opt or /srv under any conditions. That differentiation comes from a time when disks were tens of megabytes."

Am I right to assume that when I install Debian, there won't be partitions such as /usr, /usr/local, /opt and /srv created on my hard disk drive?

I only started to get serious about using Linux or *BSD distros after Edward Snowden's revelations. Prior to that I was a 100% Microsoft Windows guy.

Alan




On Wednesday, July 29, 2020, 5:22:46 AM GMT+8, Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> wrote: 





gajuph4pre@yahoo.com wrote: 
> I have manually partitioned my hard disk drive as follows:
> 
> /boot is assigned 200MB
> /root is assigned 10GB
> /swap is assigned 20GB
> /home is assigned 35GB
> /var is assigned 10GB
> /usr is assigned 5GB
> /usr-local is assigned 5GB
> /opt is assigned 5GB
> /srv is assigned 5GB
> 
> In terms of capacity, which of the above partitions are over-provisioned?
> 

All of them, none of them. These are the sorts of hard
assignments I expect from the UNIX Systems Administrator
Handbook, circa 1997 and Solaris.

My recommendation:

/      100 GB
/home  100 GB
swap 1 GB
optionally, /var 20 GB.

You don't need a separate /boot unless you're running an odd
filesystem for root.

You don't need more swap than 1 GB because any use of swap after
the kernel settles things down (say, ten minutes after boot)
means that you need more RAM. And you don't really need more

RAM.


You don't need a separate /usr or /usr/local or /opt or /srv
under any conditions. That differentiation comes from a time
when disks were tens of megabytes.

You only need a separate /var if you think you're going to fill
up log space or similar without noticing. logrotate is pretty
standard these days.

-dsr-

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