On 9/22/2011 8:09 PM, shawn wilson wrote:
On Sep 22, 2011 10:06 AM, "Stan Hoeppner"<stan@hardwarefreak.com> wrote:On 9/21/2011 10:43 AM, Camaleón wrote:...in my case, was flooding the "/var/log/syslog" file. Then it's too late and your system may become unstable and slow meaning that you are royaly hosed :-)Which is why every old school Unix guru .......I don't know that I'm 'old school' or 'guru' - either way, are we talking about a single install home system or server? Its been ~5 years since I've manually partitioned a home system. Worst case, I lvmresize and then grow the fs (what a pita). Either way, its been a while since I've seen a unix box fall over because of a full disc. So, if something fills up, go in, take your time and figure it out. You might not be able to run some GUI programs (and some services might act weird - who cares this is a home system) but you'll have all the time in the world to fix the issue.
You've just seen it, haven't you? Did Lisi have all the time in the world to fix her system? Note the hair pulling she went through. A separate /var partition may have prevented much of her troubles. The only advantage she had from her system breaking, unnecessarily, the way it did, is that she was forced to learn a lot, with some help from friends. Without support she'd have been hosed, possibly forced to wipe and reinstall.
Partitions are great if you need then. Today, I think they are one of those things that, unless you can point to the use case you have, you don't need them.
My hiking analogy sums it up pretty well:"Better to have it and not need it, than to desperately need it and not have it."
By the time one may realize he needs it, it is too late. This is the difference between "proactive" administration and "reactive" administration that you should have read about somewhere in your IT career. Planning a system with a separate /var (and /boot) is being proactive. Using one big partition/volume/filesystem for everything is setting one's self up for a reactive situation, just as Lisi went through.
In short, isolate certain functions and their write filesystems, so when one breaks it doesn't negatively affect the others, or the entire system, as a result.
-- Stan