Re: Re[6]: disk partition schemes
On Saturday 23 June 2001 03:35, Kevin J. Menard, Jr. wrote:
> >> I was thinking the other way around actually. If /boot were to get
> >> messed up, it wouldn't affect /.
>
> I guess I'm off here. By getting messed up, I mean more by say a
> sudden jolt in the power supply (of course, I do have a line
> conditioning UPS) and mess up the partition table or something.
That is something to consider, and is a good reason for having /home and
/var/separate from the root FS. The root FS then gets hardly any writes
and is unlikely to have such things. It's easy to imagine situations
where a FS is corrupted badly enough that programs can't be run from it,
but which can be fully recovered by fsck.
One thing I have considered is making the root FS mounted synchronously
to reduce such risks.
However /boot is the least written partition you are likely to have.
> RC> Having /home and /tmp on separate devices to / gives some security
> RC> benefits by limiting the ability to produce hard links. Hard
> linking RC> /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow to a name under /tmp or the
> user's home RC> directory has been step 1 of a number of security
> attacks...
>
> I didn't realize hard links couldn't cross partition boundaries. I
> tend to just use symlinks anyway.
Hard links are just two directory entries with the same Inode number.
Inode numbers only apply within the same file system.
> RC> How will one partition or two partitions affect reliability? Disk
> RC> failures tend to be boolean things, if a disk starts dieing then
> all data RC> seems to rapidly disappear from it. So in you don't have
> RAID then RC> having separate partitions is unlikely to save you.
>
> Once again, I guess I was thinking messed up partition tables or
> something. Perhaps my logic was flawed.
The most likely type of messed up partition table you are likely to see
is corruption or a read error on the first sector. This is totally fatal
to all partitions. The only solution is to make a note of the sizes of
all partitions so you can recreate the partition table.
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