> The server which is housed at the datacenter only has a single 1TB > drive. Just to confirm, LVM allows you to increase and decrease space on > any partition on the fly, but setting each volume manually with EXT4 is > a physical mount? > > If I were to set hard limits by setting each volume on EXT4 (not using > the LVM option), do you recommend only setting up a /, /boot, and SWAP? > In the past this was my partition scheme: > > Root filesystem (/) = 10240MB (10GB) > /boot = 200MB > swap = 1024MB (1GB) > /var = 20480MB (20GB) > /tmp = 10240MB (10GB) > /usr = 51200MB (50GB) > /home = all remaining space on the drive > > Is the above a bad partition? > Man, a thread like this could go on for a long, long time...... In the last couple of years I find myself more in the John r. camp. Keeping OS separated from data. Having the OS on a 10gb part and keeping all data, including home dirs off the OS. part. Your OS is not likely to grow much, but your data will and it's very easy to move/copy the data partitions more manageable for backups too. I use this kind of set up on hosts on ESXi, windows, EC2. What's you backup strat, how about disaster recovery? Do you need snap shots, or do you need to freeze the file system or mount data part ro for your backups? Ext4, XFS, reiserfs, LVM, .................... cough, cough, I'm very fond of zfs, sigh, maybe someday. Keep in mind some file systems can grow, but not shrink. I think the best bet is to install a couple of test systems vmware style and hack around a little. Test your backup and disaster recovery methods, grow/shrink partitions, test associated fs tools. You might find you're more comfortable doing/using certain things. oh.... disk1 /boot / /swap disk2 /data (including home if needed) my 2c