Help me understand my Linux filesystem and how it mounts my HDDs

[Cerpin Taxt]

When I installed Ubuntu 7.04, I used the Alternate Install CD to build a 1TB RAID0 array from 2 500GB HDD. I configured the installation to mount the entire RAID array (md0) as 1 partition at /var.

Then, on the IDE HDD (200GB) I created a 10GB partition for / (i.e. root) and a 2nd partition for the remaining space which is mounted to /home.

I'm using this machine as an HTPC running MythTV.

The issue that is bugging me is that I think the ~190GB partition that I mounted to /home will go largely unused, but at setup I didn't know what would happen if I mounted that partition to /var along with the 1TB RAID array.

How would I reconfigure my system to better utilize the ~190GB partition on my IDE HDD?

I'm thinking I would like to partition off about ~120GB into a new partition and migrate my MP3 collection onto it. Then I could simply re-direct the paths in MythTV to find the collection there. But is there an ideal place to mount the new partition?

Right now my MP3s exist in /var/lib/mythtv/music on the RAID array. Is there a way I could mount the new IDE partition on this exact path and simultaneously remove it from the RAID array? What would be cleanest way to do something like this?

 

[Brazen]

You could mount the partition in a temporary location and then copy everything from /var/lib/mythtv/music to it. Then delete everything in the /var/lib/mythtv/music directory. Umount the partition then mount it at /var/lib/mythtv/music. Be sure you edit the fstab entry for that partition so it is mounted in the new location on a reboot.

Another option would be just put a symlink from /var/lib/mythtv/music to a folder on the existing mount location of the partition.

 

[Nothinman]

You should've mounted the RAID array as /home and put all of your data in there.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
You should've mounted the RAID array as /home and put all of your data in there.

/home is for user's personal data. It sounds like he is serving up data through the MythTV daemon, which would go under /var. You wouldn't move your MySQL databases from /var/lib/mysql and put them under /home would you?

 

[Nothinman]

/home is for user's personal data. It sounds like he is serving up data through the MythTV daemon, which would go under /var. You wouldn't move your MySQL databases from /var/lib/mysql and put them under /home would you?

It's a grey area to me, I would consider my videos my personal data whether they're being served by MythTV or not. I tend to look at /var as a system hierarchy so I tend to put as little as necessary under there.

 

[Cerpin Taxt]

I really have no opinion on which suggestion is better. The only reason I picked /var was that I knew already from a previous MythTV build that the multimedia content data was stored in /var/lib/mythtv/music (or ./videos, or ./pictures, etc...) by default. I guess there was really nothing stopping me from mounting the RAID array to /home and then directing all the paths in MythTV to that.

I've read suggestions from others on MythTV forums to create a base directory exclusively for the MythTV multimedia content (i.e. /data) so that it could be more easily backed up and also mounted via NFS to the same directory on the distributed front-end machines.

So far, I've managed to mount the directories under /var/lib/mythtv to the same directory on my Ubuntu laptop which I'm using as my front-end test machine, so I guess I don't immediately see the advantages of creating a standalone directory for the data.