[mdlug] More new hard drive details

[Drew]

The disk seems, as far as I can tell, good, so I'm going ahead. Some 
additional questions I'd like
to field before I begin however. I've decided that I want multiple 
distributions, with the collected data
that is not actually part of any distribution (in effect, everything 
in /usr/downloads, /usr/iso, and maybe
/usr/vdisks) copied over to one or more partitions assigned roughly 
half of the new drive (about 160 GB),
with the other 160 GB being split into a partition for each installed 
distro. Each distro will then have
its own /home/drew replaced with, or contain, a symlink to the copied data.

First off, is it permissible for all these distributions to share a 
common /tmp? If so, should the /tmp
be cleaned out on boot? On shutdown?

Next, I've noticed that newer distros are showing my IDE drives as 
sda, sdb, ... (for the hard drives)
and sr0... for the DVD burner (and ISO images when booted in VMware). 
A little research revealed
that it's because the IDE driver is being merged with the SATA driver 
as they want to reduce the
amount of code they have to maintain. Also that you can still have 
your disks named hda, hdb, ...
but it requires compiling back in the old module. Someone at MDLUG 
said there's a boot option
that can force use of the old names.

* What is that boot parameter?
* Is there a reason to go along with the all scsi standard?
* Is there a reason to try to use the old names?


Partition size: I'd like to optimize inode and space useage. Is it 
worth while to have different partition
sizes for different sizes of files, eg, a 100G partition for ISOs and 
other big files, a 40G partition
for medium sized files, and a 20G partition for small files? Or at 
least different block size settings?
(I'm going with ext3 as I'm most sure of it being readable by all distros.)

Finally there's logical vs main partitions. As the distros themselves 
are re-installable while the data
needs better protection I had figured on going with main partitions 
for data and logical partitions on
an extended for swap, /tmp, and all distros. I'm pretty sure grub can 
handle it. However, the install
programs seem to have their own ideas on how to do this; they mostly 
want to create all logical
partitions on a single extended, with no other main partitions. Is 
there a reason for going either
way or even doing something different? What about LVM?

----

- Drew.