[mdlug] WTF /var/log

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Thu, 2011-08-18 at 18:03 -0400, Garry Stahl wrote:
> Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > Quoting Garry Stahl <tesral at wowway.com>: 
> >> Adam Tauno Williams wrote  
> >>> Yep; a good reason to have /var/log as its own volume.  Even on a
> >>> desktop/laptop system.  This is the most common problem I see regarding
> >>> omg-my-disk-is-full.
> >>>       
> >> OK, I have the drive ready to install, how do I name that volume to make
> >> sure /var ends up there?  I have a 2 tera drive, 30 for /root, 4 for
> >> swap, ?/var rest /home.
> >> And should /var be the physical partition?
> > No, none of those should be physical partitions; they should all be  
> > logical volumes.  Don't commit the entire physical volume - you can  
> > grow this later if you discover you need to [resize even works  
> > 'online' these days']
> > I'd:
> > 12GB for root [probably bigger then you'll ever need]
> > 4GB for swap
> > 4Gb for /var/log
> > 250GB for /home
> /home is at 425 gig now. 

So make home 650G.  My point is just that there is no reason to
aggressively allocation your resources; doing so just make re-allocation
or dealing with an unexpected condition more difficult.

I generally also make a /isos [for ISO images - these are big, never
change, and are typically recoverable from an external source] and
a /vms [for virtual machine files].  This reduces the size of /home
making it easier and faster to frequently backup /home.  Then I just
backup /vms at need and I never bother to backup /isos.  It also
prevents /home from reaching disk-full condition which can have odd and
possibly bad effects on running applications (it is easy when playing
with VMs to gobble disk space).