It works! Now to start over

[John Hubbard]

So I have asked questions about raid, and /var/cache getting big.  Now 
to ask that question that should have come first.  How would you 
configure the system?
I have an asus board with a dual core 64bit athalon processor.  I have 4 
gigs of ram, 4 WD 250GB hdds, wired network. 
I will use the machine as a multi user work station, file server, print 
server, virtual machine host, web server, ssh server, and maybe a mail 
server, thin client server, vpn server, cvs server.
I wanted to run 64 bit ubuntu 8.04 server.  (In all honesty, serer makes 
me feel cooler).  Some of the stuff is obvious.  I know how to set up 
ssh, nfs, samba.  Other stuff I have had troubles with (setting up 
postgresql). 
The first question is how would other users partition the drives?  
Currently all four drives have the same partitions,
1) 256MB => raid 1 (256MB) /boot
2) 5GB => raid 5 (15GB) /
3) 2GB => raid 0 (8GB) swap
4) 1GB => raid 5 (3GB) /var
5) 20 GB => raid 5 (60GB) /home
6) 220ish GB => raid 5 (660ish) /srv
When I first started trying to use my machine as a server /srv sounded 
like server and I thought that it would be a good place for server 
files.  So /srv is where my shared files are.  Most of the files are 
large (music/video files). So I set up the ext3 partition for large 
files.  (If they give you an option then why not try it?)  I set up /var 
ext3 to be small files because I was thinking about running a mail 
server off of it (now I question whether or not it is big enough.  Is 
there a better file system for mail messages. 
So someone out there who has set up more servers/workstations then I 
have please advise on how you would do it.  Should partitions 2,4,5,6 
all be one great big lvm so that I can grow/shrink as needed?  Should I 
just use standard ext3 for all of the partitions?

-- 
-john

To be or not to be, that is the question
                2b || !2b
(0b10)*(0b1100010) || !(0b10)*(0b1100010)
        0b11000100 || !0b11000100
        0b11000100 || 0b00111011
               0b11111111
        255, that is the answer.