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GummyGum173
n00b
Joined: 09 Apr 2014
Posts: 50
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 Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2014 6:27 pm Post subject: [Q] Splitting / to different partitions & using crontab |
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Hello, newbie here.
I've heard that splitting your / to different partitions (i.e. a partition for /home, /tmp etc) is much better & much secure, yet, I've seen 0 guides about it in the wiki or in the forums, so can someone please guide me on spliting the system to different partitions after the installation?
Using openRC & genkernel 3.14.14 if it makes any difference.
Also, is there a default crontab tool installed in Gentoo? If not, what tool would you recommend? I only need it for a few simple tasks, nothing big.
P.S. Is there a more recent "Flying with Gentoo" guide? (Talking about this: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-231170-start-0.html). |
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szatox
Advocate
Joined: 27 Aug 2013
Posts: 3171
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| Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2014 7:11 pm Post subject: |
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Hello Newbie
you better pick another distro. Just like you would learn climbing small walls first before going for Mount Everest. Ok, Gentoo is not impossible, but there is a price. A price newbies pay in pain. You have been warned.
Anyway, partitioning:
Check how much RAM you have. Do you want to use hiberation? Will you do any tasks that require insane amounts of memory?
If you have less memory than you're going to need, you must make up for it with SWAP partition. Also, if you want to ever use hibernate to disk, you MUST have swap partition. RAM usage on my pc hardly ever exeeds 1 GB - obviously it goes up when I run several VMs  but that's not a typical use case.
So, it's usualy a good idea to get 512MB-1GB SWAP. You would most likely know if you needed more.
The rest: for gentoo you're going to need 15-30GB for system. Bigger / will buy you more time to learn how to reclaim some space and give you extra flexibility Oh, and will let you build openoffice 
It's common to have separate /home, as it keeps your data relatively safe when you grow tired and decide to install Ubuntu instead 
Also, some common setups takes advantage of separate /boot. You probably don't need it. Probably. Dont bother with spliting / into more pieces. If you needed separate /usr, you would know that.
OpenRC and genkernel make absolutely no difference on partitioning.
Also, ANY cron will do. Feel free to roll a die. You can also roll a die for your pick on logger. All those in repo are good enough. |
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54387
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2014 7:34 pm Post subject: |
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GummyGum173,
There is a danger of starting a flamewar in my response, so I will skip the history.
/home should be it own partition. That way writes by users are confined here.
/tmp can be tmpfs (RAM) if you have the RAM for it.
/usr can be its own filesysem. It can be mounted read only except for updates, if you are paranoid.
/var can be its own filesystem.
/opt and /usr/local can be on their own partitions too but gentoo makes little use of these.
Some portage specific things ...
/usr/portage contains many small files but it will fit into 1G given a 1k block size
/usr/portage/distfiles contains large files, so there is scope for tuning here
/usr/portage/packages is similar.
This gets you something like | Code: | $ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/dm-0 1998672 720224 1157208 39% /
/dev/dm-1 61796348 14507312 44126924 25% /usr
/dev/dm-2 61796348 5570492 53063744 10% /var
tmpfs 1641404 1320 1640084 1% /run
udev 10240 0 10240 0% /dev
shm 8207004 0 8207004 0% /dev/shm
cgroup_root 10240 0 10240 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/vg-home 1056763060 826925600 176133988 83% /home
/dev/mapper/ssd-opt 1998672 244284 1633148 14% /opt
/dev/shm 8207004 48 8206956 1% /tmp
/dev/mapper/vg-var 60764220 33744448 23910756 59% /mnt/oldvar
/dev/mapper/ssd-local 1998672 5232 1872200 1% /usr/local
/dev/mapper/vg-portage 2046355 433118 1508380 23% /usr/portage
/dev/mapper/vg-distfiles 92760056 69651372 18689356 79% /usr/portage/distfiles
/dev/mapper/vg-packages 61796348 48431460 10203160 83% /usr/portage/packages
/dev/shm 8207004 27452 8179552 1% /var/tmp/portage |
Its all lvm on top of raid5 but you can mostly ignore that.
The downside to lots of partitions is that its not easy to move free space around. LVM addresses that.
How to do it ...
Boot with a liveCD, make a partition for home, make a filesystem on /home
mount your gentoo an /mnt/gentoo but make it read only to avoid accidents
mount your new home, on say /mnt/cdrom
cp -a /mnt/gentoo/home/* /mnt/cdrom/
unmount /mnt/cdrom/
remount /mnt/gentoo/ as rw
edit /etc/fstab by adding an entry for /home
touch /mnt/gentoo/home/oldhome
reboot normally to test.
ls /home/oldhome should return a file not found error.
At this point you have two copies of /home one mounted over the other.
The file /home/oldhome only exists on the old home.
When you are happy it works, you can reboot with the liveCD and remove your old howe, if you need to recover the space.
The others are similar. /usr and /var are harder as they need to be mounted before udev starts. However, genkernel will build you an initrd to do that.
If you are paranoid enough to go with the above, you should be restricting what each filesystem supports too.
e.g. noexec,nosuid,nodev on /home stops users running programs from /home. Set User ID binaries won't and no device nodes can be created there
_________________
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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GummyGum173
n00b
Joined: 09 Apr 2014
Posts: 50
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| Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2014 7:49 pm Post subject: |
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| szatox wrote: | Hello Newbie
you better pick another distro. Just like you would learn climbing small walls first before going for Mount Everest. Ok, Gentoo is not impossible, but there is a price. A price newbies pay in pain. You have been warned.
Anyway, partitioning:
Check how much RAM you have. Do you want to use hiberation? Will you do any tasks that require insane amounts of memory?
If you have less memory than you're going to need, you must make up for it with SWAP partition. Also, if you want to ever use hibernate to disk, you MUST have swap partition. RAM usage on my pc hardly ever exeeds 1 GB - obviously it goes up when I run several VMs but that's not a typical use case.
So, it's usualy a good idea to get 512MB-1GB SWAP. You would most likely know if you needed more.
The rest: for gentoo you're going to need 15-30GB for system. Bigger / will buy you more time to learn how to reclaim some space and give you extra flexibility Oh, and will let you build openoffice
It's common to have separate /home, as it keeps your data relatively safe when you grow tired and decide to install Ubuntu instead
Also, some common setups takes advantage of separate /boot. You probably don't need it. Probably. Dont bother with spliting / into more pieces. If you needed separate /usr, you would know that.
OpenRC and genkernel make absolutely no difference on partitioning.
Also, ANY cron will do. Feel free to roll a die. You can also roll a die for your pick on logger. All those in repo are good enough. |
You didn't really get me, I meant splitting the partitions like Neddy stated below, I'm kind off familiar with Linux & have Gentoo installed for about 2 months, but I only learn whenever I fail, and after a brief read in the interwebs I understood that if you split / to different partitions you get generally less chances to f**k up something (as you would only need to rewrite, /usr for example if you messed something there, or if suddenly the PC fails when it reads\writes from /tmp then the whole partition won't corrupt).
And thanks for the cron advice
| NeddySeagoon wrote: | GummyGum173,
There is a danger of starting a flamewar in my response, so I will skip the history.
/home should be it own partition. That way writes by users are confined here.
/tmp can be tmpfs (RAM) if you have the RAM for it.
/usr can be its own filesysem. It can be mounted read only except for updates, if you are paranoid.
/var can be its own filesystem.
/opt and /usr/local can be on their own partitions too but gentoo makes little use of these.
Some portage specific things ...
/usr/portage contains many small files but it will fit into 1G given a 1k block size
/usr/portage/distfiles contains large files, so there is scope for tuning here
/usr/portage/packages is similar.
This gets you something like | Code: | $ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/dm-0 1998672 720224 1157208 39% /
/dev/dm-1 61796348 14507312 44126924 25% /usr
/dev/dm-2 61796348 5570492 53063744 10% /var
tmpfs 1641404 1320 1640084 1% /run
udev 10240 0 10240 0% /dev
shm 8207004 0 8207004 0% /dev/shm
cgroup_root 10240 0 10240 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/vg-home 1056763060 826925600 176133988 83% /home
/dev/mapper/ssd-opt 1998672 244284 1633148 14% /opt
/dev/shm 8207004 48 8206956 1% /tmp
/dev/mapper/vg-var 60764220 33744448 23910756 59% /mnt/oldvar
/dev/mapper/ssd-local 1998672 5232 1872200 1% /usr/local
/dev/mapper/vg-portage 2046355 433118 1508380 23% /usr/portage
/dev/mapper/vg-distfiles 92760056 69651372 18689356 79% /usr/portage/distfiles
/dev/mapper/vg-packages 61796348 48431460 10203160 83% /usr/portage/packages
/dev/shm 8207004 27452 8179552 1% /var/tmp/portage |
Its all lvm on top of raid5 but you can mostly ignore that.
The downside to lots of partitions is that its not easy to move free space around. LVM addresses that.
How to do it ...
Boot with a liveCD, make a partition for home, make a filesystem on /home
mount your gentoo an /mnt/gentoo but make it read only to avoid accidents
mount your new home, on say /mnt/cdrom
cp -a /mnt/gentoo/home/* /mnt/cdrom/
unmount /mnt/cdrom/
remount /mnt/gentoo/ as rw
edit /etc/fstab by adding an entry for /home
touch /mnt/gentoo/home/oldhome
reboot normally to test.
ls /home/oldhome should return a file not found error.
At this point you have two copies of /home one mounted over the other.
The file /home/oldhome only exists on the old home.
When you are happy it works, you can reboot with the liveCD and remove your old howe, if you need to recover the space.
The others are similar. /usr and /var are harder as they need to be mounted before udev starts. However, genkernel will build you an initrd to do that.
If you are paranoid enough to go with the above, you should be restricting what each filesystem supports too.
e.g. noexec,nosuid,nodev on /home stops users running programs from /home. Set User ID binaries won't and no device nodes can be created there |
Ok, thanks a bunch, will try that and come & report my success here, if there will be any problem |
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gentoo_ram
Guru
Joined: 25 Oct 2007
Posts: 476
Location: San Diego, California USA
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| Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2014 12:01 am Post subject: |
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There are lots of ways to partition for various reasons. I mostly have my partitions split by security settings. Here are mine:
| Code: | Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md12 3.7G 1.5G 2.1G 42% /
/dev/mapper/vg-usr 50G 21G 27G 44% /usr
/dev/mapper/vg-opt 5.8G 2.8G 2.7G 51% /opt
/dev/mapper/vg-home 148G 78G 63G 56% /home
/dev/mapper/vg-tmp 5.8G 13M 5.5G 1% /tmp
/dev/mapper/vg-vtmp 12G 511M 11G 5% /var/tmp
/dev/mapper/vg-log 16G 2.0G 13G 14% /var/log
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(plus others for media storage...)
I keep all logs (syslog) on /var/log. I keep logs on a separate partition so they won't end up filling up some other partition. I set the filesystem flags: (rw,noatime,nosuid,noexec,nodev) Notice these flags are pretty tight.
/tmp and /var/tmp I put on separate partitions. /var/tmp is used for portage builds. /tmp is used for other stuff. Flags are : (rw,noatime,nosuid,nodev,commit=0) Can't have noexec on these since some build scripts need to execute stuff made in intermediate steps. Security is a little lighter.
/opt is for 'external' software usually installed outside of portage for me. Flags: (rw,noatime)
/home is for user files. Flags: (rw,noatime,nodev,nosuid)
The partition sizes are totally up to you. |
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