I'm building a couple boxes next week. These are for
home use and the exercise is as much the reason for
doing it as the result. I wanted to poll the list for
thoughts on swap partitions. I started years ago with
Caldera distros and used a swap partion tripple the
size of ram. I don't remember where that rule came
from but I followed it for a number of years. At last
years installfest I was pursuaded to reduce the size
to double that of ram. In the last year I've been
using multiple swap partitions, 2 to 3, each a little
larger than ram. All of these partitions reside on the
hda.

I'll be building two types of box, workstation and
low-end server, and they're all to run debian. 

I'll build one workstation, initially woody then
upgrade to sid. This box will have 512m ram. Last time
I went to set this up it wouldn't let me set my swap
partitions to exactly 512m, so I went a little larger
thinking that I can swap in all of ram, then swap it
back out again. I believe there's three of these swap
partitions. This is on the box I'm using to compose
this email and it seems to work great. Any
suggestions?

I'm building two of the low-end servers. These will
again be running woody and I intend to keep them at
stable. I'm building these with some old slot-1 PII's
I have laying around and intend for the first to be a
file server using nfs and samba and the second to be a
backup to the first, making a copy of the firsts
drives roughly every 24 hours. I'm not planning on
them running X, and I'd like to pull their monitors
and keyboards once they're stable, administering them
with webmin from a workstation. My questions is again
about swap files. Theses boxes will be running minimal
ram, I've got 128m for each. I was thinking of doing
the install with the 256m combined, then splitting it
once there up. But what about the swap partitions?
I've never intentionally built a box to run without X,
will this effect my swap partition strategy of 2 or 3
partions roughly equivelant to ram, or should I use a
different strategy?

Let me know your opinions.
Alex
I'm not addicted to Linux, I can quit any time I want
to go back to the bsod.

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