Please bare with me, I am a bit of a novice here and these might be some dumb questions.

I recently acquired a dedicated server with dual 73 gig scsi drives. The partitions of the first drive are as follows:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda7 1012M 236M 725M 25% /
/dev/sda1 46M 25M 19M 58% /boot
/dev/sda2 9.9G 2.3G 7.2G 24% /usr
/dev/sda3 6.9G 535M 6.1G 8% /var
/dev/sda5 47G 26G 19G 58% /home

The second drive is simply:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 68G 328M 64G 1% /backup

Here are my questions:

1. Does that partition scheme seem ok?
2. I have tape backups (40 gigs a night) so I don't really need the 2nd drive for backups. I do not have RAID on this machine, so that is out. What can I use the 2nd drive for? Can I host files like videos on it or will that cause problems with the server? If I can host files on it, see #3.
3. I can access the drive via SSH, but is it somehow possible to access the /backup via FTP? That way uploading videos to it is a snap.

I'm sure some of these questions are ignorant. Please go easy on me.

Thanks for any help!

1) The partition scheme looks fine. If you are going to be doing hosting I would suggest you secure your /tmp as noexec though.

2) Well you could mount it as /home/username/videos or something if you want to store the data. The partition information is stored in /etc/fstab

3) Look at scp, it is file transfer over a ssh tunnel. Basically it acts like ftp BUT is secure. You can login to scp using any username/pass that can login to ssh (like root if you have direct logins enabled).

Hope this helps you out some :)

if you are using /backup as like a mirror of customer files/data.. use rsync.. unless you are creating like weekly/daily snapshops.

rsync will only move files over that are new or newer then what is there so it'll save resources

Originally posted by eth00
2) Well you could mount it as /home/username/videos or something if you want to store the data. The partition information is stored in /etc/fstab

3) Look at scp, it is file transfer over a ssh tunnel. Basically it acts like ftp BUT is secure. You can login to scp using any username/pass that can login to ssh (like root if you have direct logins enabled).

Hope this helps you out some :) [/B]

Thank you kindly for your info.

2. If I mount another as /home/... wouldn't it interfere with the first /home/ partition? I'm sorry if that is a stupid question, i'm bad at this stuff :(

Can't I leave it as /backup and make a /backup/videos or will that data not be accessable?

3. Thanks!

It will work as /backup/videos

If you mount it someplace OTHER then /home you are ok. If you mount it as /home/username/videos then only that directory will be the new drive. The rest of /home will be the partition that already exists.

Don't worry about the question being too stupid, playing around with filesystems can be confusing and you don't want to screw up ;)