Re: Partitioning
on Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 05:32:38AM -0600, Ron Johnson (ron.l.johnson@cox.net) wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-11-02 at 20:13, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> > on Sun, Nov 02, 2003 at 08:03:07AM -0600, Ron Johnson (ron.l.johnson@cox.net) wrote:
> > > Hard disks are so big nowadays, is a separate partition for apt
> > > really necessary? If it ever gets too big, 'apt-get clean'.
> >
> > Houses are so big nowadays, is a separate room for sleeping really
> > necessary? If it ever gets too big, 'call the maid'.
>
> ???????? People need/want privacy. My emails don't care if they
> are on the same partition as OpenOffice. How can they? They aren't
> sentient.
Actually, they may.
/home doesn't need to be SUID. /usr does. /home needn't be executable,
/usr does. /var may very well want a smaller sector size than /home. A
news or mail spool needs lots of inodes, and may prefer noatime mount
options. /usr and /home can be remote NFS mounts.
> > Partitioning is about logically organizing the space you have, and
> > setting/tuning configuration options appropriately. If you like living
> > in a warehouse, by all means do. If you prefer not shitting in the
> > open, give yourself a bathroom with a door.
>
> Your warehouse analogy is almost the perfect justification for my
> "disks are so large", fine tuning isn't as necessary anymore" notion.
Bollocks.
Many warehouses have an office space (usually enclosed), storage is in
racks or tiers. Bulk or binned goods may be separately stored.
Read the partitioning reference listed elsewhere in this thread (or
Google "linux partitioning") for numerous reasons why you _might_ want
to consider partitioning your system (and why, in general, I'd recommend
that you _do_). The issue isn't size, it's control, recoverability,
damage containment[1]. Assigning properties to partitions, segmenting
backups and recovery, allowing partitions to be slotted around, etc.
Of course, if you don't need, or don't plan to use, this level of
control, that's up to you.
> Back when disks were "small", getting a partitioning scheme right
> was vital, because you usually had multiple drives, and had to
> decide how optimize the space, while making sure that things like
> /tmp & /var/spool didn't fill up and kill the apps. That worry
> is minimized nowadays, since capacities are so huge.
The more reason to isolate your system partitions. Generally small,
ammounting to 3-6 GiB of storage net, of 80-200+ GiB. Hell, you can
double this, and create an entire secondary on-disk backup (or just a
minimal "system2" partition -- mine fits into 150MB) and allocating the
remainder to local system data -- /home and/or /usr/local.
Peace.
--------------------
Notes:
1. Anecdote: I damanged the root partition of the system I'm using
now, and managed to recover it, mostly live, using Knoppix, while
still having access to other partitions on the system. The fact
that it's a single-disk, 20 GiB system is completely irrelevant to
whether or not I'd want to partition it.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Ceterum censeo, Caldera delenda est.
SCO vs IBM Linux lawsuit info: http://sco.iwethey.org
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