Special partitions
- a: must be created on the root disk and used for the root filesystem (/).
- b: must be created on the root disk and used as swap space.
- c: represents the entire disk and must not be altered. (Just ignore it.)
Minimum sizes for a full installation
(root) 60MB
/usr 420MB (no X) or 550MB (with X)
/var 25MB
/tmp 50MB
swap 32MB
Considerations
- It's a good idea to put user-writeable directories such as
/home and /var/www in a separate partition. This helps if you want to set quotas and prevents problems with a user fills a partition.
- More space in
/var for internet facing machines. (Remember logs are kept in /var/log.)
- Keep enough space in
/usr/src if you expect to build lots of source code (eg. when rebuilding the system).
/tmp is used for building some software
Sizes that work for me
Below are sizes that worked fine for a machine with at least 115GB hard drive space. This should leave more than enough room to handle most tasks for the kind of servers I need. Space is left unallocated to leave room for expansion.
Partition Filesystem Size
a (root) 200MB
g /usr 10GB
e /var 10GB
d /tmp 1GB
b swap 512MB
h /home 50G
Resources
