Note: This page is quite old and is likely out of date. My opinions may have also changed dramatically since this was written. It is here as a reference until I get around to updating it.

Recommended / Best Practices

  • /boot 200Mb
  • swap 1.5x times the amount of RAM
  • /
  • /home
  • /tmp
  • /var
  • /var/log
  • /var/log/audit
  • Encrypt all partitions except /boot

Creating an LVM partition

Create a Physical Partition

  • Open the drive in fdisk, create a new primary partition
  • Mark the new partition as type ‘8e’ or Linux LVM
  • Write the partition table

Create Physical LVM Volume

pvcreate /dev/sdc1 (assuming /dev/sdc1 was the partition just created)

Volume Group Creation

This point needs a bit of thinking before doing. There is a limit on the number of physical extents that can be accessed. This in turn limits the size of the volume group. This limit is 65,536 extents.

The default size is 4MB/extent. This by default leads to a limit of 256GB per volume group. 8MB/extent gets you 512GB. The maximum size I see needing is 32MB/extent for a size of 2TB. The following example uses an extent size of 16MB and assumes the partition is /dev/sdc1.

vgcreate -s 16M vg_test /dev/sdc1

Logical Volume Creation

The following creates a 1GB logical volume group, there does not seem to be a way to create a logical volume with all the remaining space in the volume group.

lvcreate -L 1G -n lv_test vg_test

Securing Partitions

  • Add nodev to all non-root local ext{2,3,4} partitions in /etc/fstab
  • Add nosuid and noexec to /tmp partition
  • Bind mount /tmp to /var/tmp with rw,nodev,nosuid,noexec,bind as options
  • If removable storage is enabled add nodev, nosuid, noexec to their partitions
  • Disable auto mounter (autofs)
  • Dynamically encrypt the swap partition (not for any machine that will be hibernated)

Encrypting Additional Partitions

cryptsetup luksFormat -c aes-xts-plain -s 256 -h sha256 /dev/vg_test/lv_test
cryptsetup luksOpen -c aes-xts-plain -s 256 -h sha256 /dev/vg_test/lv_test \
  cryptTest
mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/cryptTest
cryptsetup luksClose /dev/mapper/cryptTest