[Madlug] Critique my disk partitions

[John Heim]

From: "Will Maier" <willmaier at ml1.net>
>> ? The one thing that puzzled me (besides whether
>> to use LVM is that debian would have created a / partition with
>> less than 1 Gb. Wouldn't that make it difficult to install a new
>> kernel?
>
> It depends on how you partition the rest of the system. IMHO, the
> less that lives on /, the better. Certainly, no user-writable space.
> My boxes have the standard save-your-ass statically-compiled
> utilities and kernel on / and little more.

The reason I thought I needed much more space for / is that one time I was 
installing a new kernel and it ran out of space when trying to build 
/lib/modules/2.6.xx/. The /lib dir is part of / so when you install a new 
kernel, it makes a new /lib/modules/<kernel>/ directory. On that particular 
machine, I had to remove the 2nd oldest kernel in order to install a new 
one. In other words, I could only have 2 kernels at a time -- which is 
really no big deal I guess. But ever since then, I thought you couldn't 
*really* screw up partitioningbecause you can always do things with symlinks 
except for running out of space to install a kernel.

The only other time I've ever messed up partitioning was to not allocate 
enough space for /var. The /var partition filled up and  then dhcp crashed 
because it couldn't log. I could have fixed that by mmessing around with 
symlinks. It wouldn't have been ideal but...

Judging by the variety of responses I got, I didn't ask a stupid question 
(for once). There were contradictory answers for using LVM from 2 of the 
smartest people on this list. That usually means either way will probably 
work.

One more sort of related question... Would you put a mysql server on the 
same machine that does DNS, dhcp, ldap (for logins) and print servering (?) 
or would you put it on your web server? We are going to build a new web 
server too on identical hardware.