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I've been using Ubuntu for a while but didn't really paid attention on partitioning and just accepted the defaults.

But on a new project we plan on setting up two old servers HP DL380 G3 both would have identical components with 2 x RAID 1 SCSI volumes at 72GB. This will be setup with DRBD for failover.

The server's main function will only serve as a firewall using IPTables no other apps will be installed except for some network monitoring tools, then 2 or 3 additional users maybe.

Due to the limited disk space I want to keep the partition simple.

/ (root) 
/var/log (mostly for firewall logs) 
(swap)

Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

halflogic
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  • Are you trying to ask "How should I partition my server?" There's a lot of information on [this question](http://serverfault.com/questions/449395/unix-server-partitioning-filesystem-layout) that would help you... – voretaq7 Feb 14 '13 at 20:17
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    I'd like to suggest not setting up two G3 servers because... well, that's just silly. You'd probably save enough on juice and cooling alone to justify a small plug server or something running a low power CPU, like an atom. – HopelessN00b Feb 14 '13 at 20:21
  • @voretaq7 - thanks for sharing the link. – halflogic Feb 14 '13 at 23:01

2 Answers2

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Failover in this case isn't really going to have any impact on partitioning. A standard partitioning scheme on both should work just fine.

I also agree with HopelessN00b's comment; you'll spend more in power in a year powering one G3 than the cost of a suitable new, enterprise grade desktop machine.

Stephan
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  • HopelessN00b : you are both right on the power consumption I just don't have any choice right now. So I was thinking maybe I'll remove the second RAID volume and take out hot spares to save a bit. – halflogic Feb 14 '13 at 23:15
  • Honestly, I think it'll be the fat cpu, high speed fans, and other massive power consumption; your hard drives will be the least of your power consumption issues. In fact, if *all* it is going to be is a firewall, you'd be fine with a diskless setup (i.e. boot from a custom configured DVD or USB.) – Stephan Feb 15 '13 at 00:20
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As you won't need much space for the base system I would recommend to use as much space as possible for LVM. Maybe like 10 to 20 GB for /, a few GB for swap and /var (or /var/log) as a logical volume. This way you're very fexible, for example you can increase /var when needed or if you ever use it for another service you can create a new logical volume for that.

By the way, on a firewall DRBD doesn't make much sense IMHO, as most of your important data (iptable rules, configuration) is staic anyway. You could use for example csync2 to keep configuration on both hosts in sync.

tlo
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