Looking for Advice on Debian Server Setup

[Lisa Kachold]

On 4/27/09, Mark Phillips <mark at phillipsmarketing.biz> wrote:

> I am setting up a new server for Plone/Zope sites on a Linode VPS. Reading
> the "Securing Debian Manual" (
> http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/), it recommends
> separate partitions for /tmp, /home, /opt, and /var. I was talking with some
> of the Linode folks on IRC to find out how to set up separate partitions,
> and they felt that it was unnecessary to have separate partitions for a
> production server (regardless if it is on Linode or not).
>
> I am interested in any opinions on the subject from this list.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Mark
>

Old partitioning in Linux was required and many schemes existed.
There are as many schools of thought as there are systems
administrators, just like the ext3, xfs arguments.

It's also been my experience that what is more important (and often
not even compared) is a selection of drive media (SCSI, SATA/PATA, FC)
bus speed, read/writes and patch versions on linux kernel drivers.

I.E. I have run systems with one HUGE / directory under SCSI that were
screaming fast running the same version of redhat without divided
partitions compared with the same American Micro "whitebox" running
IDE drives that were dog slow.  I rarely needed to fsck a partition,
instead losing the the whole drive (due to heat issues, cheap media or
both).

Now most production systems use a variety of drives, but especially a
fine RAID controller card, over LVM/LVM2.

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