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partitions Re: ReiseFS vs XFS




On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, Daniel Garcia wrote:
 
> Why is it interesting to have a different partition
> for / and for /home? I have never seen the point in a
> home
> computer. Isnt it more painful to have to calculate
> the size for each partition

rasputnik> * If /home gets hosed, you can still get in single-user to
	fix/restore it.
rasputnik> * same for backups
rasputnik> * you can set quotas on a per-partition basis.
rasputnik> * one dumb user (possibly you) is not going to be able to fill
	/
rasputnik> * you can reuse /home between different Linuxes
rasputnik> * when you reinstall, skip formatting /home and you don't lose
	your data

and when you rebuild or restore 
	... you only need to rebuild the system directories
	and /home will always have your own user data

hmh> So that your / is as static as possible.  And decoupled from about as
hmh> much as possible.

brad> * any filesystem a user can write to directly (e.g. /home, /tmp)
brad> * any filesystem a user can write to indirectly (e.g. /var)

but, users should not have any user-defined stuff in /var

brad> * any filesystem you want to save the information on (e.g.
brad>   /usr/local, /opt)

add to the list

anybody ( you ) can read/write your home data from any other pc if /home
is separate, and you cannot screw up the machine hosting /home if its
a separate partition
	RemoveMachine# mount home:/home/daniel /home
	RemoteMachine# rm -rf /home/daniel
 
	- you can do your work from any pc 

you want maximum disk space for users .. and minimum space for the
static system 

"system files" is backed up on the internet ... millions of places
	/home/daniel is not backed up anywhere in the world

	and there's hundreds of ways to recover/recreate a working
	server

--------

you want / to be 32MB or 64MB ( small as possible == smaller is better )
so that you can restore or fix a crashed system in "single user mode"
or recreate a brand new system in a few minutes

	minimum / is typically /dev /etc /bin /sbin 
	and nothing else is needed to boot including /boot is NOT needed

	you do NOT want to be waiting ( hours/days ) for ext3 or reiserfs
	checking its entire 100GB or 1TB of disks  instead of just
	checking 64MB system to get into single user to fix the problem

	if "/" is fs clean, you can be 100% sure you can keep working
	
you want /tmp /var/tmp /usr/tmp to be non-exploitable with 1777 as
it's permissions
	- if those 3 partitions is in the same partition as /,
	your whole system dies when "tmp" is exploited


probably lots more reasons why partitions is required
vs the headaches (for newbies) of why it is needed

and than there's the lazyman and yet sometimes okay school of thought
of just one partition for them, but that doesn't mean others should
follow them vs following the crazies with 7 or more partitions

	- you can decide which way is better for you
	after you had problems with one approach or the other
	and why that problem occured in the first place

	- partitions being 100% is NOT an acceptable excuse
	but is a sign of inadequate planning or your outgrew 
	your system and time to get a bigger disk

cya
alvin



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