Here's my thoughts on an optimal way to repartition a 19 GB hard drive for a web server:

/: 100 MB
swap: 256 MB
/usr: 3.9 GB
/var: 2 GB
/tmp: 500 MB NOSUID
/home: rest (~12 GB) NOSUID

Comments?

/usr is where MySQL is installed and I plan to put some pretty big archives in it. (Hmm, actually perhaps /usr/local/mysql/data should be moved to /home/mysql/data, in order to separate code from data? Then /usr only has to be 2 GB and I have more flexibility.)

/var is where logfiles will go. Mail goes in /home however, since I'm running qmail with Maildir delivery.

/home is where users' files go.

Acually if you wanted to optimize it, you could make a partition read only, send all the superuser files there, then link em back. But seems like you got a good one, with one main exception. Honestly I have never had a server use a lot of swap space, I think im at the 10 meg mark currently. But I think they recomend you have atleast double your ram size.

> But I think they recomend you have atleast double your
> ram size.

I've heard that before too, but I never quite understood the reasoning behind it. If I have more RAM, shouldn't that mean I need *less* swap space? Unless that rule is trying to guess how much total memory I need based on the amount of RAM I have.

My machine has 512 MB of RAM, and I think 256 MB of swap space should be enough (my old server, which I am moving stuff from, is 256 MB of RAM with 512 MB of swap). Then again, I could increase the swap space to 512 MB without loosing much disk space.

What is the difference between having it suid and not suid?
what are the disadvantages of having it no suid (for /home)

If a partition is set nosuid, then any suid or sgid bits on files in that partition will be ignored. This is for security reasons; the experts recommend that any partition where normal users can write to (/tmp and /home) be set like that.

I think this is to prevent user A from tricking user B into creating a file and chmod'ing it u+s such that user A now has control over user B's account.

What about symlinking /tmp to /home/tmp? That way you won't have to worry setting quota on both filesystems. Moving MySQL data to /home is also a good idea, especially if you want to quota the database.