Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 10:24:11AM +0800, Bob wrote:
Interestingly I've been thinking about this recently as I migrate my
home servers, firewalls, etc.. to Etch. It occurred to me that since
one of the main reasons we partition harddrives on a server is so that a
problem causing one partition to fill, won't necessarily cause the whole
system crash, given this, what would be really cool would be to
partition the system at install time using a slightly mean, but
granular, best guess layout [0] so things should fit in their partitions
without too much wasted space, then configure each partition as one
mount point on one logical volume consisting of one physical volume [1]
and then partition up the rest of the drive in 1GB chunks that sit in a
pool of unused logical volumes so they can be assigned to any mount
point when needed, preferably automatically.
sounds like a lot of work to end up with essentially the same problem,
which is your mass storage filling up. If you have 100 gigs floating
around and you chop it up into little chunks and assign them to parts
of the tree as needed, you'll eventually fill up 100 chunks and be in
the same boat. Except you'll lose a larger %age to overhead from
maintaining all those little bits. Much better, imo, to carve up one
reasonably sized chunk for the system /, /usr, /etc, etc and then a
couple really big chunks for those areas that might need it, /var/www
for web, /var/mail, /home or whatever.
The point is that you end up with roughly the same amount of space,
but don't have to mess with a whole pile of partitions. Further,
because of lvm, if things are out of balance (like my mail partition,
currently at 4 gigs is way way too big. if I had need I could
recapture some) you can adjust them using e2fsresize and lvresize
etc.
Yes, ultimately you can't make more space, at least not that way, but
you can make better use of the space you have, you'd have the Auto Chunk
Add LVM System (ACALVMS) setup to keep your mount points on LVs that are
~%70 utilized, whereas due to bad decisions or leaving room for future
planes, some of my partitions are only %20 full. On many servers the
system drives and the data drives are separate [0] so the system drives
are fairly empty, with this all of your system data would be at the
front of the drive, [2] which might even be faster as the heads don't
have to move so far. But that's not the point, it's just very flexible
as you don't have to know what size a partition might grow to at install
time, you don't have the problems you get with sticking it all in one
partition where some growing log can fill the space needed for some
other program, and for the most part you don't have to muck about with
resizing and moving, partitions and file systems on a live system.
It would just make life easer for beginner server builders, they
wouldn't have to wring there hands about how much space to allocate to
this or that and could just do it. If you're worried about how much
space you'd loose to overhead, it probably means your harddrive is too
small, ;-) also you could loose less by making it less granular and
having 5GB chunks, which would still achieve the same result more or
less, you could even have a bunch of chunks on a second, spun down
harddrive that would only power up when needed.
[0] I'm probably not advocating it on systems where this isn't the case,
but for instance my home file server has become my apt-proxy, it's got
one 32GB IDE system drive [1] and a 1TB RAID5 array for storing my
files, and because I don't want my 10GB apt-cache cluttering up my RAID
array, I just left it on the system drive, which frankly isn't doing
much else, but when it ran out of space on /var I shrunk some virtually
unused partitions like /home and created a big /var/cache, but all that
would have been automatic with ACALVMS
[1] actually it's an 80GB single platter Hitachi but I jumper all my
system drives down to 32GB so I can dd from one to the other without
concern for capacity, and since 32GB is more than enough for pretty much
any OS, even 3 or 4 of them, it's never been a problem, though I haven't
tried the latest bloatware from the evil empire, which probably can't
install on less than a gig
[2] so your /tmp, or swap or whatever partition doesn't start on the
90th GB it starts on the 12th,
--
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copy of Windows 95 if you want.
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