Server on small HDDs

Alex Satrapa grail at goldweb.com.au
Tue Sep 17 17:49:12 EST 2002


On Tuesday, September 17, 2002, at 01:11 , Scott D. Ferguson wrote:

> I would like to install Linux onto an old computer (P120) which has 3 
> hdds (2 x 1.2Gb 1 x 1Gb), and use it as a server for a small network 
> (Samba but not Apache).

The main server on my network is a P166 with 256MiB of RAM.  Out of 5GiB 
of HDD, I've used about 3GiB, including 2GiB of web cache, email and log 
files.

> With such limited space I would like to use the space more efficiently

5GiB is hardly "limited" space.  However, what you could do to prevent a 
full filesystem from interfering with the operation of your server is 
create a separate partition for log files.  On my home system, I have 
two drives - one is mounted as "/" and includes "/home".  The other is 
mounted as "/var".  Thus the home users can do what they want and fill 
up the drive, but this won't affect the mail server, web server or 
logging (all of those are under /var).

A Debian install with just enough to get Samba and Apache working should 
only take up about 300-400Mb, assuming you don't clean the apt cache 
every time you install something.

You might want to try splitting the 1Gb volume into two partitions of 
about 500MiB each, and use one for "/", the second for "/var/log", one 
of the big drives for "/home" and the other big drive for "/var".  This 
way your log files will be written to a dedicated volume - no worries 
about disk drives getting too full.  Your users will have a volume all 
to themselves, and your webcache and email have another volume 
(/var/spool and /var/cache) to themselves.

That's just my opinion, YMMV.  When all you're dealing with is data 
storage, 1GiB is a lot of room.  When you're dealing with Windows 
application software (games especially), even 10GiB is starting to look 
very small these days.

Alex
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