Re: regards the /
Am Freitag, 23. September 2011 schrieb Stan Hoeppner:
> > 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.
Whether you separate partitions or not, you´d usually still have to react
when one partition becomes filled up. No?
For some setups, especially unattended setups with risk to be targets of
denial of service attacks or user putting large files everywhere,
separating partitions make sense. For others it might be easier to just go
with one bigger / and let the system distribute free space dynamically
between /, /var/log, /tmp and what not.
The more separate partitions you have the more flexibility in dynamic
freespace distribution you loose.
And since you´d usually have to react on a filled up filesystem anyway as
long as you have some server monitoring for free space on filesystem (and
other values) in place, IMHO the separating of partitions is not the one
and only golden rule anymore. It may well make sense on certain setups,
but on others it may raise administration overhead, especially when
partitions are used instead of logical volumes and the initial estimations
become obsoleted by real life scenarios.
--
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
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