Re: Patititioning hard drive
On Wednesday 05 December 2001 03:35 am, Cheryl Homiak wrote:
> My new hard drive is a 20gg drive as opposed to my old 2.5gg. I have read
> all the information about partitioning. I have decided to make linux the
> only OS on this hard drive. Can somebody who has experience with this size
> drive tell me if there is major advantage to breaking up the hard drive
> into smaller partitions. I d, of course, intend to have a swap partition
> and a boot partition in addition to the main one.
> Thanks.
>
>
> Cheryl
I don't recall seeing an answer fly by, so I'll take a stab.
There are two basic reasons for having extra partitions: reliability, and
security.
Reliability:
Suppose some rogue process starts spewing out error logs; eventually, even
with a large drive, your /var partition could fill up. If this partition is
part of the rest of the system, this means the "drive" fills up, and the
system doesn't have any space in which to work. Boom, your system hoses. If
/var is on its own partition, only that partition gets filled, and the system
may have trouble breathing, but it won't die.
Security:
If everything is on its own partition, then some partitions, like /usr/bin,
could be mounted read-only. This would prevent accidental
deletions/overwrites, intentional cr/hacker corruption, etc. I also
understand that if some cr/hacker breaks in over the net, having mulitple
partitions provides an extra measure of security, but don't quote me on that.
In my opinion, if it's just a home box, there's not any major advantage to
breaking up such a large drive into multiple partitions (although personally,
I still would, because I tend to think it's the Right Thing to do). If it's a
server machine, I'd definitely break up the partitions.
Kent
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