Assigning a disk to my home folder on Ubuntu Server

Alex Knopp

10/14/23, 2:02 PM

Good afternoon all. I have a HP Pro Liant Micro Server and Ive installed Ubuntu Server to create a home file server for a friend. I have 2 x 4TB HDDs installed and I think the RAID is setup correctly.

I want to make sure that the user has full access to the most space possible but Im not sure this is correct.

I ran the following command:

lsblk

Which gives me:

NAME                      MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0                       7:0    0 233.2M  1 loop /snap/nextcloud/31751
loop1                       7:1    0  55.6M  1 loop /snap/core18/2566
loop2                       7:2    0    62M  1 loop /snap/core20/1587
loop3                       7:3    0  79.9M  1 loop /snap/lxd/22923
loop4                       7:4    0    47M  1 loop /snap/snapd/16292
loop5                       7:5    0    48M  1 loop /snap/snapd/17029
loop6                       7:6    0  63.2M  1 loop /snap/core20/1623
loop7                       7:7    0   103M  1 loop /snap/lxd/23541
sda                         8:0    0   3.6T  0 disk 
├─sda1                      8:1    0     1M  0 part 
├─sda2                      8:2    0     2G  0 part /boot
└─sda3                      8:3    0   3.6T  0 part 
  └─ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv 253:0    0   100G  0 lvm  /
sdb                         8:16   0   3.6T  0 disk

Then I ran the following:

df -h /home

Which gave me:

Filesystem                         Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv   98G  9.0G   84G  10% /

Am I right in thinking that the home folder only has 100GB of storage? I want the user to be able to use all the available storage but Im not sure Ive got this setup right.

Your advice is greatly appreciated.

0 + 5

partitioning

David

10/14/23, 2:04 PM

The simplest way to allow a user to access all the disk space is to not have made partitions in the first place and let the install create the defaults. In that way no one partition is full till the whole drive space is full.

user535733

10/14/23, 4:29 PM

"*Am I right in thinking that the home folder only has 100GB of storage?*" Yes, in the sense that the entire root filesystem --including /home-- is 100GB. The use of both RAID and LVM seems duplicative. Only specific uses require both, and a "home file server" is not really one of those uses. Get that part ironed out first. Yup, that might mean a reinstall depending upon the answers that your friend is happy with.

Alex Knopp

10/14/23, 5:20 PM

David I thought I did do everything to default! @user535733 Ideally Id like to have 8TB of storage there really but I wonder if thats something hardware related as I think I read somewhere that the HP Proliant auto setup the raid. I'll go through a reinstall and see if I can spot the LVM option and make a better choice. Thanks for your help both.

user535733

10/14/23, 5:30 PM

Anecdote: For my own home file server, I use a teeny little 60GB SSD to house the root filesystem and nothing else. No RAID, no LVM, no complexity, simplest boot possible for the root filesystem. The many TB of storage and backups (and RAID in the past) are on mount points, so their failure won't prevent boot...and failure of the boot SSD won't corrupt any or lose of the data.

oldfred

10/14/23, 7:13 PM

I do not use LVM, but have seen where default install with LVM, does not use all of a volume. It is easy to expand, and very difficult to shrink. So they let the user decide if he wants all the space or have additional volumes. http://askubuntu.com/questions/852019/i-wish-to-expand-my-lvm2-partition & http://askubuntu.com/questions/196125/how-can-i-resize-an-lvm-partition-i-e-physical-volume

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