Re: Corel/Debian Linux Installer
Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
>
> On Mon, 16 Aug 1999, Christopher W. Curtis wrote:
>
> > I mist first say that I have not seen the installer; I've seen some screen
> > shots but all that is eye candy is not all which is useful. The most
> > confusing thing for many people is how to partition the hard drive. Red
> > Hat and Caldera take the approach that a bad partitioning is better than
> > none, and tend to create a swap partition and then a single huge partition
> > for data. Or two. This is foolishness.
>
> No, it isn't. There isn't a single good reason to partition a disk into
> little chunks on a end-user workstation - and these days there are some
> valid but generally not very important reasons to do it on a server.
Well, that's not really true. I've often times used "flaky" hardware in
my Linux systems simply to get more use out of them. The problem with
them though is that they are flaky. There is an old saying: There are two
types of hard drives - those that have failed, and those that will.
Having a small / partition allows for much easier recovery of a bad disk.
Also, if I have to do complicated things, I can fsck one or two smaller
partitions (/usr(w/local--backups),/var) without having to wait for /home
to fsck, reducing total downtime, especially if I hose something and have
to end up fsck'ing all over again when I reboot.
> The two most compelling reasons to carve a single drive into little
> partitions are space management and mounting /usr readonly. On a
Space management is actually a downside of partitioning. You always end
up with wasted space. With the larger hard drives, this is less of an
issue and, imo, more reason for good partitioning. Additionally, quotas
are enforced on a partition level, but this is more a serverside issue,
granted.
Christopher,
apologizing for spelling/grammar mistakes; my oven timer is broken and
I've gotten little sleep. :(
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