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Re: Partitioning disk




also, /var can have a tendency to fill up rapidly, and if it's on the same
partition as / there can be some pretty significant problems cropping up.

rick

Ethan Benson writes:

> On Fri, Dec 01, 2000 at 05:11:13AM -0800, Lazar Fleysher wrote:
> > 
> > Hi Everybody,
> > 
> > This question has been a topic of many discussions but I still do not
> > understand the reason why people suggest to have separate partitions of
> > /usr
> > /usr/local/
> >  
> > In early days when disks were small, this was the only choise, but now,
> > why do not just have a 1 - 2G partition for the system and other
> > partitions for other things as needed?
> 
> a seperate partition for /usr/local is useful so you can do a clean
> install of the rest of the system without trashing /usr/local, or
> mucking with tarring it into /home or such.
> 
> seperating /usr /var /tmp and /home keeps your root filesystem small
> and static reducing the chances of it ever becomming corrupted.  this
> also has security benifits since ordinary users have no write
> permission to the root partition any longer (through /tmp /home or
> /var) otherwise they could completely fill up the root partition which
> tends to cause corruption and other Bad Things.  
> 
> speaking from experience having all /var /tmp /home /usr /usr/local
> and /var/tmp seperated makes recovering from filesystem corruption
> much simpler, if i had gone the MS style `one huge bloated all
> encompassing / partition' i would have lost alot of configuration and
> user data several times now.  (i have a particular machine that must
> have a buggy IDE chipset or something) 
> 
> another advantage of having /usr and /usr/local on seperate partitions
> is you can mount them read-only which saves alot of fsck time if the
> machine is shut off improperly or every 20th boot if you shutdown at
> night.  since /usr is the largest filesystem it takes the longest to
> fsck.  
> 
> keep / small 64MB is way more then enough, split off everything else:
> /var /home /usr and /tmp at a minimum, splitting /usr/local and
> /var/tmp is also a good idea.  IMO
> 
> -- 
> Ethan Benson
> http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/




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