Mike McCarty wrote:
I am considering installing CentOS 4.4, and am interested in how best to set up. I have been using FC2 and helping administer a Debian machine for a few years, but do not consider myself a Linux guru. My current set up uses a /swap partition which is 2x my memory size
This is a completely false premise that has no basis in Linux or even in verions of Solaris after SunOS4. Only SunOS4 *REQUIRED* swap be twice the amount of RAM due to how its VM was implemented. The best of part of this is that this is actually a part of the 'knowledge' that the LPI examinations will examine you on.
With regards to swap, on servers you want to tune things such that swap is NEVER used but do create some swap space to handle edge cases. On desktops, create as much swap as you wish to handle firefox, thunderbird or whatever memory hungry GTK application you have. Of course, the more RAM you have, the merrier.
I'm also interested in whether it be reasonable/desirable to make /home, /tmp, and /var be on a separate partition. I have heard arguments on both sides, some claiming that with ext3 the system won't become unbootable because of /tmp filling up.
ext3 reserves blocks and inodes for root so it is true that /tmp filling up will not prevent boot up to an extent. You might find it necessary to make sure /var is not filled up if it prevents any critical services from starting. Putting /home on a separate partition makes it easier to upgrade the OS without having to move data around. If it were possible to make / read only, I would definitely put /tmp on a separate partition and just use ext2 for it.
I would therefore put at least /home and /var on separate partitions if it were a server where /home had data. If not, /var will be on its own. If it were my home desktop, /home definitely gets its own partition.
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