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Root partition should be close to center of drive which is achievable by putting first boot, home and swap partitions, and only then /tmp, / and var (/ can include
/usr and /opt). As working set of partitions for Linux is really small (12 GB or less) the
large harddrive you have the better results you will get as in larger harddrive the size of each
cylinder bigger and movement of the head will be smaller. So 320 10K RPM drive can give a run
for the money to 146 15K RPM drive.
primary partitions:
mount -o remount,nodev,nosuid /home
Extended partitions
#!/bin/bash # Title: RHEL 6 Hardening # Author: Oageng Escobar Baruti # Date: 24/08/2015 # > # DESCRIPTION: DISABLE / REMOVE / STOP / START / CONFIGURE # # Configure File Systems cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.`date +%d%m%Y_%H:%M.%S` mount -o remount,nodev /tmp mount -o remount,nosuid /tmp
To optimize disk configuration put both swap and home partitions before root partition. This way root partition will be closer to the middle of the disk.
Raid 5 arrays can survive failure of only one drive. So for large disk enclosures it is suicidal to configure all disks as a single RAID5 virtual drive via Dell or HP RAID controller. You are better off with RAID 6 if your controller support it.
If you are stuck with RAID5 you beed always use in conjunction with a spare harddrive to increase resiliency. Also it is not necessary to put all drives into a single virtual disk on the controller. If you have, say 16 drives, it might make sense to split them into two groups 8 each (each with a spare) and have better resiliency
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With RPM-based Linux distributions, version-to-version upgrades often don't work very well. A fresh installation may be the better choice. One may be reluctant to do this, because of the potential loss of data, preferences, configuration, and third-party applications. Also, if you don't like the newly installed system, the thought of reinstalling the old system to switch back to it is not a pleasant thought either.This document describes a means of reinstalling Linux frequently, while minimizing the effort needed to become productive on a new system. It also allows you to instantly and effortlessly rollback to a previous Linux OS if you aren't happy with a newly installed system. Some possible applications of these suggestions include trying a new Linux distribution, or staying up-to-date with the latest beta release of your favorite Linux distribution.
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction
- 1.1. Assumptions
- 2. Partitioning
- 2.1. Swap
- 2.2. Root Partitions
- 2.3. Data Partition
- 2.4. Variations
- 2.5. Partition Table Summary
- 3. Installing The First Instance of Linux
- 3.1. Install Target
- 3.2. Bootloader Location
- 3.3. Mount the Data Partition
- 4. Fixing the Bootloader
- 4.1. Move Bootloader Files
- 4.2. Install GRUB in the Boot Sector of the Root Partition
- 4.3. Edit the Boot Menu
- 4.4. Booting the Linux OS
- 5. Home Directory Maintenance
- 5.1. Setup the Data Partition
- 5.2. Symlinking to the Data Partition
- 5.3. Using the Customized Home Directory
- 6. Installing More Linux Systems
- 6.1. Bootloader Location
- 6.2. Mounting the Data Partition
- 6.3. Creating the Symbolic Links
- 7. Practical Use
- 7.1. Beta Snapshots
- 8. Other Hints
- 8.1. Third-party Applications
- 8.2. Make the Most of Symbolic Links
- 9. Summary
1. Introduction
If a little extra care is taken when first installing Linux on a system, it can require far less maintenance over the lifetime of the system. This document presents suggestions for using partitions and symbolic links to your advantage to minimize the effort required to test-drive a new Linux distribution.1.1. Assumptions
The rest of this document makes the following assumptions:
- The system has a single hard disk: /dev/hda
- Windows is installed on /dev/hda1
- Your hard disk is sufficiently large, relative to your needs, that you can leave at least one 5 to 10 GB partition unused at any given time
- You know how to install Linux, including repartitioning
If your system differs from this, you'll need to make appropriate adjustments to the examples that follow. For example, if you do not have windows installed, the swap partition can be /dev/hda1 instead of /dev/hda2. If you actually think you can find a use for the entirety of your modern, huge hard disk, this document is not for you.
2. Partitioning
2.1. Swap
Use /dev/hda2 for the Linux swap partition. It is usually recommended to have a swap partition 2x the size of physical RAM. So, if you have 1GB RAM, make a 2GB swap partition. 2.2. Root Partitions You'll want at least two root partitions so you can install a new version of the distribution, a different distribution, or a new build (or example, the next beta) without losing the Linux system you currently use. This way you can always instantly rollback to the previous system without loosing any data. Depending on the size of your hard disk, you'll probably want to make these partitions 5 to 10 GB each. 2.3. Data Partition Create one more Linux partition consuming the remainder of the hard disk. This is where data will be stored so that it will not be lost when the OS is reinstalled onto one or the root partitions, and so that multiple systems can share the same data. 2.4. Variations You can have other partitions if you like. Perhaps you want to have a separate partition for VMWare images. This isn't really necessary though since everything can be lumped under the Data partition, and symbolic links can be used if you want things to appear to be somewhere else. If you want to share data between Linux and Windows, you may need an extra FAT32 partition. Linux can read from NTFS volumes, but not write to them (last time the author checked). By having an extra FAT32 partition (drive D: on Windows), you can put data on this partition and access it from either Windows or Linux.
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Posted by Steve on Thu 27 Sep 2007 at 06:32Tags: dphys-swapfile, swap, utitilities
When a GNU/Linux machine runs out of physical memory it will start to use any configured swap-space. This is usually a sign of trouble as swap files and partitions are significantly slower to access than physical memory, however having some swap is generally better than having none at all. The size of swap allocated to files, or partitions, is usually chosen arbitrarily with many people adopting the "double the memory size" rule of thumb. Using a dynamic system can ease the maintainance of this size.
The relatively unknown dphys-swapfile package contains a simple script which will create and activate a swapfile at boottime which is sized appropriately for your system.
The advantage of this dynamic creation is that the swap will be resized automatically if you upgrade your memory and don't remember to do it.
Upon recent kernels there doesn't appear to be a significant penalty to using swap files as opposed to swap partitions. With this in mind I'd recommend files rather than partitions, to give yourself more flexibility.
To get started first remove any existing swap you have allocated. You can view any swap space which is in use by running:
skx@vain:~$ /sbin/swapon -s Filename Type Size Used Priority /dev/md1 partition 2931768 557428 -1Here we see that there is swap allocated to the physical raid volume /dev/md1. We can disable that by running:
root@vain:~# /sbin/swapoff /dev/md1Once it is gone we can now install the package upon installation the system will create and activate then new swap:
root@vain:~# apt-get install dphys-swapfile Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following NEW packages will be installed dphys-swapfile 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 9572B of archives. After unpacking 111kB of additional disk space will be used. Get: 1 http://apt-cache sid/main dphys-swapfile 20061020-1 [9572B] Fetched 9572B in 0s (60.5kB/s) Selecting previously deselected package dphys-swapfile. (Reading database ... 116206 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking dphys-swapfile (from .../dphys-swapfile_20061020-1_all.deb) ... Setting up dphys-swapfile (20061020-1) ... Starting dphys-swapfile swapfile setup ... computing size, want /var/swap=1876MByte, generating swapfile ... of 1876MBytes done.Now whenever you boot you'll have /var/swap created at a size of twice your amount of physical memory, automatically.
You can verify this yourself with the swapon command we demonstrated earlier:
skx@vain:~$ /sbin/swapon -s Filename Type Size Used Priority /var/swap file 1921016 0 -3If you wish to change the location, or size, of the generated swapfile please create the file /etc/dphys-swapfile and give it contents such as this:
# /etc/dphys-swapfile - user settings for dphys-swapfile package # author Neil Franklin, last modification 2006.09.15 # copyright ETH Zuerich Physics Departement # use under either modified/non-advertising BSD or GPL license # this file is sourced with . so full normal sh syntax applies # where we want the swapfile to be, this is the default CONF_SWAPFILE=/swap.file # size we want to force it to be, default (empty) gives 2*RAM CONF_SWAPSIZE=2048 ## # Give yourself three times the memory size of swap? # # mem=$(grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo |awk '{print $2}') # CONF_SWAPSIZE=$(expr $mem \* 3) #
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