cfdisk and partioning (I know there is already much about it

[McGyver]

Hi Folks,

dropping into knoppix, I realised that there is also a siegfried distri around that seems to be useful for my scenario at home.

It is based on knoppix 3.3 afaik so it should be a kernel above 2.4.19
I am noob on linux although I am looking into the scene for quit some years now.
Here is my problem:

I manually configured my partinions with cfdisk and for a first run I'd like to have 3 primes with
/dev/hda1 as swap (500MB)
/dev/hda2 as root (2,5GB)
/dev/hda3 (~152 GB) that I tried to set as home

root is ext3 I did try to set the type to hda3 also to ext3 but it does not display as for hda1 and hda2. There it says 'swap' and 'ext3' behind the partionions. Hda3 has nothing behind it.
writing the ptable cfdisk tells me that it could not reload partition table and asks for a reboot.
After rebooting it shows the same scenario. I tried to set it as 'swap' than it is shown but I do not need 2 swaps.

Where is the mistake?

Thanks in advance
McGyver

[Markus]

Did you look at the sticky about partitioning and cfdisk? Especially these parts of the first post:
Partitioning:
Logical Drives (extended partitions).

BTW, with that much diskspace I would allocate 5 GB for root unless you're planning some heavy downsizing of the install.

[McGyver]

Thanks for the hints.

Yes I gone through it but I did not get the clue it seems. When I set the type, nothing happens. I come back to the screen and it still says /dev/ hda3 | Linux|[empty]| size.
And it says for the other partitions swap for hda1 and ext3 for hda2 where it is empty for the third partition.

I think I will not need more than the 2,5 GB because I do not need something like open office because the only purpose will be a file server for linux clients and a samba for backup or so.

McGyver

[McGyver]

... ok I did it with qtparted instead of cfdisk and now I have set it to jfs, but cfdisk still shows me nothing than Linux for hda3 is this ok?

[Markus]

... ok I did it with qtparted instead of cfdisk and now I have set it to jfs, but cfdisk still shows me nothing than Linux for hda3 is this ok? That's probably ok, IIRC cfdisk says nothing more for me either. You could check with "sudo fdisk -l" but it should work. I take it you clicked "commit" in qtparted and formatted the partition.


I think I will not need more than the 2,5 GB because I do not need something like open office because the only purpose will be a file server for linux clients and a samba for backup or so. Should be enough for that. I have a Kanotix install as an ssh server and the root takes up ~1,2 GB and I could still remove a lot, like the X-server.

[McGyver]

oups, yeah
the ssh is running on my machine too, but I could not connect - have still to learn a lot. For the fli4l router it was much easier. They made it really simple for rookies.
How ever, I will read a little bit more in the docs and hopefully come through.
and yes I formatted the partition and now it is mounted as /home - seems to work.

Siegfried is not that much as far as I see at the moment so it will be suffiecient to have this 2,5GB. Anyway it is the first install for that "Server" and it will not have much to do - it will more or less just be a backup for my data, like a NAS - but much cheaper as the hardware was there (o:

Thanks so far
McGyver

[le91688]

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=4

if u set yours up using that it will work...

[McGyver]

Hi Folks,

thanks so far!
hda3 seems to be trustable. I set /dev/hda3 to /home in fstab and moved the old /home/*files* to.
I also was able to samba-share a /home/*user* directory to the network to write to and copied 500Mb to it. Seems to be consistent.

Now the partition issue is gone comming to a new roadblock: It seems that I did not understand the security strategy of linux completly as I am trying to set /home/public as a samba-share writeable to all users in the network. But it results in having only read access to that share. But this is a totally other story.

As I am fine now with my partitions, thanks for your support on this issue.
cu
McGyver

[Markus]

Hmm, I don't use samba, but I have a ext3 partition on the server that is rw for all users. There's probably more than one way to do this, but my solution was to add grpid to it's options in fstab and set group of the mountpoint to users. That way all new files and dirs get the group users. So you could make a new partition and mount /home/public under that. Not sure what would happen if you set grpid now as an option for /home. Might be worth a try since /home/username shouldn't be affected unless you create a new user, and for that you can remount it temporarily without the grpid option.
My point is that having a partition writable is not the same thing as all users being able to read all files already there. You can do this with umask of course but personally I prefer quite strict umasks. Again, I don't use samba so take this for what it's worth. A guess, perhaps and hopefully an educated one but still a guess.

[McGyver]

Hi,
you were right! The public had a root root and for others just a r. I now changed it with chmod and chown. Now it is working as it should work. Now I have a new view on the security logic within linux...