Server Partition Set up

Your docs talk about the server partitioning for a single partition architecture

http://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/installation/automated

swap: The swap partition should be at least twice the size of RAM on the system.

/boot: The /boot partition should be large enough to accomodate a few system kernels and initrd images. Your OS vendor probably knows best what size this should be.

/: The remainder of the disk(s) should be devoted to /. This is where all system and user data will go.
Multiple Partitions

but on our new machine (CentoOS 6.0 which we will upgrade to 6.2) I don’t see any “swap” as such if I log in as root

cd /

I see this: (fyi I’m a unix OS newbie=I don’t know what I’m looking for, or how to look for it.)

bin cgroup etc lib lost+found mnt proc sbin srv tmp var
boot dev home lib64 media opt root selinux sys usr

i.e it looks like we are up and running with a single partition not even a separate partition for boot or swap.

Do we need to change anything? Should be make a separate Swap partition?

Howdy,

Swap wouldn’t show up as a file or directory… you can see the swap by running this command:

free -m

[root@13957-78553 ~]# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 11902 1043 10859 0 64 606
-/+ buffers/cache: 371 11530
Swap: 14079 0 14079

So, Swap is supposed to be set to twice the RAM…

top - 21:11:23 up 13:20, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Tasks: 132 total, 1 running, 131 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 12188040k total, 1068028k used, 11120012k free, 66212k buffers
Swap: 14417912k total, 0k used, 14417912k free, 621304k cached

so it does not appear to be enough… should we and how do i change that?

Howdy,

Well, setting swap to twice the RAM was a good rule when dealing with systems that had 512MB of RAM, or maybe a gig or two.

But, you have 12GB of RAM there, and I don’t think I’d recommend 24GB of swap.

If you used anything near that, your server would probably slow to a crawl do to the disk IO load.

I think that all looks good – I’d probably leave your swap the way it is :slight_smile:

-Eric

I agree with Eric. :slight_smile: A server with 12 GB should problably not need any swap space.

Anothet command to view active swap spaces (yes there can be multiple) is

swapon -s

Understood, that’s what I thought. OK, then… we are good to go… time into install Virtual Min on fresh new metal! wish us luck!