/tech/ - Technology★

>if you think it is, just answer questions that don't invade your privacy

How about I think this is and tell you to fuck off instead.

>>866527

just wanted to know what is good way to do partitions and what stuff to keep on each partition

and what folder structure is optimal

>>866533

There's a thread for tech support questions already.

>>866539

we don't believe you. are you hiding something from us?

>>866545

I'm using Windows nigger does it look like I'm hiding shit?

I see what you're trying to do tho

>what partitioning do you have on your hard drive? And what folder structure?

1, count em, 1 Linux 83, count em, 83 type 1, count em, 1 3, count em, 3 ext partition, with the bootflag on. Everything there as root.

>How many partitions you have and what you store on each partition? what is size of each partition? what order of partitions you have (especially important for mechanical HDD's as they are the fastest at beginning of drive, slowest at end)?

1, count em, 1 partition. 1, count em, 1 TB. 1, count em, 1 as 1.

>What is your folder structure on your hdd (root/main directories)?

3, count em, 3 exts.

>What kind of things you store on your hdd? (like games, programs, music, movies, documents, books, virtual machines, porn, your personal video recordings, etc)

1, count em, 1 base linux install. A number that keeps on growing, count em, a number that keeps on growing amount of hacker leaks.

>Are all of your disk encrypted? With what tool and method?

0, count em, 0 encrypted partitions.

<inb4 datamining - if you think it is, just answer questions that don't invade your privacy

10, count em, 10 black dicks in OP's mouth.

don't partition your data. use LVM

I keep all my CP in /usr/share/zoneinfo/

I keep my terroristic plots to overthrow the US government while oppressing minorities and blowing up federal buildings in /var/tmp

>>866593

>oppressing minorities

>not kept in /var/trump

On my current harddrive I have the whole thing minus 6 GiB in a ext4 partition for my whole operating system. 6 GiB of swap.

I then also mount a harddrive which contains a bunch of random data.

I then also mount all my previous installs in case I need to chroot into them to run a program or something silly.

>>866595

In more ways than one was that a joke. Notice the hidden "ru" in the word "trump." Coincidence?

partitions are the king

>LUKS with key

>>LVM

>>>/ 15GB

>>>/var 12GB

>>>/tmp 12GB

>>>/home the rest, about 1.8TB

>LUKS with random key

>>swap, 6GB I think

All partitions Ext4.

32GB SSD with FDE (including boot)

EXT4

30GB root and 2GB swap (low swappiness)

All my other disks are fully encrypted storage drives (btrfs).

I have an obsd server with default structure.

>>866846

>encrypted swap

You are a dumbass

512MB ESP

* Btrfs subvols

This is what I do

40MB EFI (on newer machines)

256-512MB /boot

8-12GB /

RAM x 2 Swap (if less than 8GB)

Remainder /home

Addition internal drives fstabbed

/mnt/sda (mkdir user name and chown)

/mnt/sdb

(rsync backup cronjob)

/mnt/sdc (mkdir user name and chown)

/mnt/sdd

(rsync backup cronjob)

Removable media

Should automatically pop up in /media

>>866996

I'd like to add on this, Microsoft has a 100MB partition for EFI. I've tried 32MB, but apparently that wasn't enough so I rounded up to 40MB. It just werks.

>>866954

Last I checked Linux did not do it itself (OpenBSD does), and it's critical when using full disk encryption. The only reason I even have that is as a buffer for when some stupid program goes on a memory spree, which rarely happens on a toaster laptop with 8GB RAM and Xfce.

/ ext4 sda 60gb noatime ssd

/usr/local/games ext4 sdb 60gb noatime ssd

/tmp tmpfs ram

My games drive is nearly full. My home folder is full of music and meme webm, also work.

Ignore c: it's a retarded bsd thing where partition c is the entire drive

  a:          2097152               64  4.2BSD   2048 16384 12958 # /
  b:         17106992          2097216    swap                    # none
  c:        234439535                0  unused
  d:          8388576         19204224  4.2BSD   2048 16384 12958 # /tmp
  e:         28467520         27592800  4.2BSD   2048 16384 12958 # /var
  f:          4194304         56060320  4.2BSD   2048 16384 12958 # /usr
  g:          2097152         60254624  4.2BSD   2048 16384 12958 # /usr/X11R6
  h:         20971520         62351776  4.2BSD   2048 16384 12958 # /usr/local
  i:          4194304         83323296  4.2BSD   2048 16384 12958 # /usr/src
  j:         12582912         87517600  4.2BSD   2048 16384 12958 # /usr/obj
  k:        134336000        100100512  4.2BSD   2048 16384 12958 # /home

ls ~
doc - documents
 - edu - university things
 - src - source code
 - rnd - personal ideas and notes
 - ref - pdfs mostly
mpv - band/album/song
old - backups
pod - youtube + podcasts + movies
tmp - downloads and quick notes

GPT > MBR even if BIOS is better

>>867274

You probably don't need swap if you setup ulimit values correctly.

>>867351

All you use is floppies or USB sticks/memory cards? Because any hard drive must have at least one partition.

>>867424

Bullshit.

>partitions

Holy shit how did this usenet post from 1997 get here?

>>867006

Nvram likes to fill up and purging it can be a nightmare. Fedora likes to dump a hundred platform keys into it for instance

>>867937

One OS per machine is all I need. Debian handles the freedoms on my X200/X200T, Windows handles the dirty stuff on my heavier laptop.

>>867435

Segregating /var and /tmp makes sense to reduce fragmentation since they have frequent writes.

>>867435

Please elaborate on what would make you think that dividing a hard disk into multiple partitions made sense in the 1990s but not anymore thereafter (because that's what you appear to believe, inferring from your post).

>>867937

People think that 'one partition = one OS'? Shit.

A sane minimum is two partitions, one for the OS and one for data. Having the OS on a big partition which stretches all over the disk will make OS files become dispersed all over the disk as files are deleted and copied in updates etc. Also it makes things more difficult if the OS needs to be wiped and reinstalled (with data on a separate partition you can reinstall the OS with the data untouched). Additional partition might be involved, such as UEFI partition, recovery partition etc. Also since Vista Windows will make a separate 100MB BOOTMGR partition if you install it on a disk which doesn't have any active primary partitions. For Linux you need a swap partition, should at least separate / and /home (as per the above - separate partitions for OS and data), it might also make sense to have separate partitions for /boot, /var, /tmp (those two are important on servers, so logs couldn't possibly fill up / and bring the system down), some even make /usr separate. If multibooting different OSes there are many possibilities depending on the particular setup (OSes, bootloaders, etc.). One might also make multiple partitions for data, though that is rarely needed (and can sometimes backfire if one volume happens to fil up and then you need to put things where they don't really belong). Generally partitioning is very useful, those who claim otherwise obviously don't know much about it and are trying to hide their lack of knowledge by trying to ridicule it and making fallacious and uninformed statements.

>>867321

I never managed to get a /boot partition working on GPT.

Not sure if because of me or cfdisk.

>>867955

An OS might strech over many partitions, and you could put multiple OSes on a single partition (not exactly very elegant, but possible - for example, see >>867937 's picture where Win98 and DRDOS sit both on a single FAT16 partition).

Primary laptop

Disk: Unknown 240GB NVMe M.2 SSD

256MB ESP vfat

/EFI -> rEFInd

/ -> vmlinuz, vmlinuz-failsafe EFIStub kernels

4GB swap

~236GB Gentoo rootfs f2fs

Generic Gentoo system for the most part

/var/cache/ccache/ contains ccache files for Portage, each package gets its own directory

/usr/local/bin contains self-made helper scripts

/home/$USER is structured in directories like

Documents

Movies

Music

Downloads

where everything except Downloads is automatically synced via ownCloud, all file contents are encrypted on the server. No LUKS or anything on the local machine, and while my kernel does support native F2FS encryption, so far I never used it.

The desktop/home server I never use

Disk: Seagate Barracuda 5400RPM 2TB literal 2011-tier SpinningRust™

~1.7TB generic Win7 Ultimate with gaymes

~2MB grub_bios

~128MB ext4 boot with GRUB and kernels

~270GB Gentoo rootfs ext4

/main.swap: 10GB swap file for emergencies

Otherwise same setup as above except the synced folders in /home/$USER are all in a designated folder, all other directories are random junk and the source for a custom out-of-tree rt8192cu kernel module.

~30GB btrfs unused

Originally designed for testing advanced cloud storage ideas, remains unused to this day.

Do you put portable programs (that don't install into the OS but just come in a *.zip etc. and work from anywhere) in "Program Files", or elsewhere?

Do you sort files by subject first and then (if at all) by file type, or the other way around (i.e. do you keep all your PDFs in one directory divided by subjects, or do you keep any PDF along with other files on same subject, regardless of type)?

/home/

/OS(linux)/

/data/ ntfs

/data/ ext4

/OS(win)/

Do you keep most of your data on just one disk(or array), or is it dispersed over many disks? If the latter, how do you keep things organized and keep track of what is where?

>>867975

Is that the physical order of partitions on your disks? If so, it strikes me as a little odd.

>>867948

Solid state drives.

>>867988

>efi

>unironically showing off botnet in a proud manner

>>867989

>Solid state drives

And where does you belief those would make partitioning irrelevant stem from? Short-stroking (HDDs have greater speed at the beginning, as opposed to SSDs) is by far not the only reason for dividing a drive into multiple partitions (>>867958 named quite a few).

>>868000

SSDs don't fragment. Bulk data should not be on your system drive to begin with. Even Windows can do a non-destructive reinstall. Dual booting is ancient history with improved compatibility for live USB and VMs. I could go on but I'm not going to, I know /tech/ is too proud to admit that they might be wrong. I don't know why I even bother.

>>868014

>Dual booting is ancient history

Opinion discarded.

>>867937

I just zfs datasets for that. Gentoo Musl, HBSD, and Gentoo glibc so that I can make sure my patches don't fuck up gpooc before I send them upstream .

>>868014

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-booting

Please point me to where it says exactly that partitioning and/or multibooting were obsolete concepts (as you seem to be asserting).

>>868073

dual-booting implies you're still using windows-- multiboot implies you can't into VM/jails

>>868273

>dual-booting implies you're still using windows

So you can't dual boot two non-Windows OSes?

>multiboot implies you can't into VM/jails

So there's no reasons to run OSes natively anymore? Maybe you would like to have mainboards with a mandatory hypervisor built into firmware, where you can't install anything natively?

>>868386

Hey man, I'm not the other guy, I'm just telling you what he's implying.

Personally, I don't like the idea of virtual machines, other than to test stuff that is too dangerous for good hardware.

>>867937

I mean technically I multiboot, but it's pointless since I'm always in my main distro. If I ever need anything from a different one I can almost always just use directly or chroot into it and use it.

>>868448

I wouldn't recommend storing LUKS keys on the same SSD drive you encrypt since it's unproven whether erasing information off flash memory is reliable enough. I use external flash drive with bootloader that I always keep with me. In case of emergency, it's much easier to destroy than an internal NVMe drive.

>>867364

Won't setting a ulimit just kill processes though when it tries to go above? Even if swap causes the system to grind to a halt it at least gives me a chance to notice and cause an orderly closing of a program.

A swap partition the size of my RAM, and a compress=lzo btrfs partition that spans the rest of the disk.

I used to have a separate /home partition, back when I sometimes blew up my system. It came in handy once or twice and then I became competent enough not to blow up my system any more, and also competent enough to debootstrap around /home in the unlikely case I'd need to, so I stopped dividing it up.

one 20mb because grub needs it and another for everything else. CP encrypted to the cloud via Joint Intel+Google+kik (R) SecureCloud (TM)

>>867933

A block device is a block device is a block device. What's a partition, anyway? Are we talking about MBR partitions or GPT partitions? Or something entirely differnet?

I've been regularly using HDDs without partition tables for years. Just run mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda and mount it wherever you like. The first 1024 bytes of an ext4 filesystem are padding, so you could even fit a bootloader in there.

>>868621

>Just run mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda and mount it wherever you like.

It's non-compliant to put a filesystem directly onto a physical disk unless it's removable. How will fdisk react in such a situation? Fixed disks are supposed to have a partition table in place (whether MBR, GPT, or some other obscure scheme is secondary), they are not floppies where you just go like mkfs.msdos /dev/fd0 and be done with it.

>>867933

>Then show me an example of a HDD/SSD configuration with a working filesystem but no partition table.

>It does work for removable drives such as floppies,

>>869052

>It's non-compliant to put a filesystem directly

>Fixed disks are supposed to

So are we talking about 'working' or 'compliant'? And compliant with what, exactly?

>How will fdisk react in such a situation?

I don't know, but why does it matter?

I just noticed you could put a ext fs directly on a block device which is smaller than the block device itself, create a mbr partition table in the padding and add partitions that come after your fs. Then you could mount /dev/sda as well as /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2...!

>>868537

>I wouldn't recommend storing LUKS keys on the same SSD drive you encrypt since it's unproven whether erasing information off flash memory is reliable enough.

If I understand you, you're telling me to use a detached LUKS header?

How the fuck are LUKS headers sensitive information?

Here's one of my LUKS headers, what's wrong with this being at the head of the disk?

# cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sda
LUKS header information for /dev/sda

Version:       	1
Cipher name:   	aes
Cipher mode:   	xts-plain64
Hash spec:     	sha512
Payload offset:	4096
MK bits:       	512
MK digest:     	ff eb ae 51 c6 c3 d0 da da ba ee cd aa 66 4b 7f 8f b9 61 c6 
MK salt:       	59 cd 34 9f 11 e3 93 da 3d 5f 05 02 c6 ee b4 22 
               	ed c1 a9 ea 7e 98 7b e1 92 2b f8 76 3f b0 3e bf 
MK iterations: 	146941
UUID:          	3c71a584-3e29-4934-980a-be2df5c7c0ad

Key Slot 0: ENABLED
	Iterations:         	1000
	Salt:               	6a 5d 97 2d 38 98 93 83 05 28 2e 04 a2 e5 d9 7a 
	                      	50 bb 3c 89 d3 60 31 ee cb a9 15 c2 6e ab 31 89 
	Key material offset:	8
	AF stripes:            	4000
Key Slot 1: ENABLED
	Iterations:         	11755330
	Salt:               	c5 f1 2a 0e 2e a9 15 56 b2 ba 84 ab 93 45 1c 66 
	                      	c6 49 c4 c9 57 ed ac 7e 4c 7b f2 5d 14 21 cb 98 
	Key material offset:	512
	AF stripes:            	4000
Key Slot 2: DISABLED
Key Slot 3: DISABLED
Key Slot 4: DISABLED
Key Slot 5: DISABLED
Key Slot 6: DISABLED
Key Slot 7: DISABLED

>>869155

Which operating system installer supports the lack of partitions and creating a filesystem on a raw physical disk? Which operating system supports booting in such a setup?

>So are we talking about 'working' or 'compliant'? And compliant with what, exactly?

Just because you pulled off some hack which works under specific conditions doesn't mean it's good practice. Virtually all disk utilities expect a fixed disk to have a partition table. Have fun meandering around self-inflicted issues and making life difficult for yourself.

>>869187

Aha, now we're from 'compliant' to 'good practice'. I've literally had nothing but a LUKS on my laptop's HDD for more than five years. The bootloader and kernel were on a SD card. I'm still putting my backups on unpartitioned HDDs because why not?

>which works under specific conditions

It works under all the conditions

>and making life difficult for yourself.

how?

>>869155

If you don't care with compliance to what OS installers and tools such as fdisk expect, you're on your own. Don't complain if by any chance shit breaks or gets corrupted somehow. Good luck.

>>869206

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/14010/the-merits-of-a-partitionless-filesystem

>Conclusion: it works, but it's not a good idea.

>>869206

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/346826/is-it-ok-to-mkfs-without-partition-number

>While creating a filesystem on a whole disk is possible, I don't recommend it.

I have to create my zpool on unpartitioned disks because Solaris is 1970s technology where a partition table defeats their block cache.

>>869809

Why use 70's tech then?