suggested size of /var/mail

[Predrag Punosevac]

Wojciech Puchar wrote:
>>
>> Are there any smart ways to decide how to size /var/mail.
>> I plan to put it on a seperate partition ... or shouldn't I?
>>
Your question is too serious to be answered in an email but I give a try.
First of all I would suggest that you read the pages 25-28 of the book 
Secure Architectures with OpenBSD by Brandon Palmer and Jose Nazario as  
the partition issue is discussed in detail. There is also an excellent 
how to http://www.kernel-panic.it/openbsd/mail/
by OpenBSD users group on the topic of secure mail server (they also 
have a slue of other nice articles http://www.openbsdsupport.org/).
I personally would stick with sendmail MTA but that is your call.

No back to the question of partition.

Personally no matter what I like to have separate

/
/swap
/tmp
/var
/usr
/home

I would size them as follows if I had 20 Gb RAM. First of all I would 
leave 2-3 Gb empty in the case that I run out of memory space on any 
particular partition. You can use disklabel or system install to add 
additional disk space where needed. The rest as follows

/swap is usually 2xRAM
I would go with / with 1Gb.
1Gb /tmp
/usr maybe 2Gb depend if you are going to use only sandmail or to use 
different MTA as all the programs are installed there.
You probably need to install IMAP server, MySQL, and Squirrel .  I would 
run spam assassin and Clamav on two other separate physical boxes. 
Probably PIII that you can get for $10 are good enough for that. So you 
need to make sure that there is enough space for all the programs in  /usr

For  /home very little .

/var as much as you have left because you do not want to run out of log 
files. At least 12-13Gb on the disk size of 20Gb but the disk space is 
so cheap so I would probably go with at least 160Gb total disk space 
even for the home server. That also depends how many users you are going 
to serve. I hope somebody smarter than me help you with that part.


I would crypt at least swap. After the configuration you can edit 
/etc/fstab and actually make / only readable. You can also see what else 
can be mounted only as readable thing but now we are moving further to 
the questions of security and that is whole another book.

Kind regards,

Predrag






> while considered bad/dangerous/whatever i ALWAYS make only 2 partitions:
>
> swap and root
>
> and NEVER have problems how to size a partitions.
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