centos install / partitioning

Question

I'm using NOC-PS to remotely install Centos 6.2 via KVM / IPMI.

I'm going to install cPanel as well and they recommend this layout

/boot (99MB)
swap (2x server RAM)
/ (remainder)

In the o/s install profile within NOC-PS software, it shows as this:

part /boot --fstype ext2 --size 250
part pv.01 --size 1 --grow
volgroup vg pv.01
logvol / --vgname=vg --size=1 --grow --fstype ext4 --fsoptions=discard,noatime --name=root
logvol /tmp --vgname=vg --size=1024 --fstype ext4 --fsoptions=discard,noatime --name=tmp
logvol swap --vgname=vg --recommended --name=swap

By the time the default partition setup was done installing Centos, I get this

[root@server005 ~]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg-root   532G  907M  504G   1% /
tmpfs                 7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1             243M   28M  202M  13% /boot
/dev/mapper/vg-tmp   1008M   34M  924M   4% /tmp
[root@server005 ~]# cat /etc/fstab

#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Fri Dec  7 18:47:24 2012
#
# Accessible filesystems, by reference, are maintained under '/dev/disk'
# See man pages fstab(5), findfs(8), mount(8) and/or blkid(8) for more info
#
/dev/mapper/vg-root     /                       ext4    discard,noatime 1 1
UUID=58b31aaf-5072-4fb1-a858-33bc316fa793 /boot                   ext2    defaults        1 2
/dev/mapper/vg-tmp      /tmp                    ext4    discard,noatime 1 2
/dev/mapper/vg-swap     swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
tmpfs                   /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
devpts                  /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
sysfs                   /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
proc                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0

My question is, how should the NOC-PS install profile look like to get the recommended cPanel partitioning?

The server has 16GB RAM, dual 600GB SAS drives and will be used for cPanel shared hosting.

Your installation looks reasonable enough. What's wrong with it? — Michael Hampton, Dec 08 '12 at 03:41
I see no swap in df -i output. And then there's the other /tmp and /dev/shm that do not need to be there according to cpanel. http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/AllDocumentation/InstallationGuide/ConfiguringOs — , Dec 08 '12 at 03:44
The cPanel recommended layout looks odd to me. Part of that is because there are two schools of thought. 1) Use as few partitions as possible. 2) Make a robust setup with separate /tmp, /var/log, /var/log/mail, etc etc. So that one runaway process will not bring down the entire server. For servers I subscribe to belief 2. For quick test machines (DevOps) 1 will do fine. --- Secondly: Swap twice as big a RAM? That was useful in ye old times. These days that no longer holds. — Hennes, Dec 08 '12 at 03:47
I don't see anything in those docs that say that those should be removed. And your swap wouldn't appear in `df` output anyway. Use `free` to see how much swap you currently have active. — Michael Hampton, Dec 08 '12 at 03:49

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:13

Your setup is reasonable engouh. /dev/shm is okay. You can just accept that it is mandatory for any recent Linux installation.

Having /tmp on a separate disk is not a bad idea. If you really want to get rid of it, you can take out the line that says logvol /tmp. No need to do that, though.

Swap does not show in the output of df but you can see it with free -m or cat /proc/swaps. And "double the size of RAM" is an archaic recommendation that you can probably ignore. You can also refer to Should I completely turn off swap for linux webserver? for more discussion on swap.

centos install / partitioning

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