Apparently, though unproven, at 23:21 on Tuesday 02 November 2010, Volker Armin Hemmann did opine thusly:
> On Tuesday 02 November 2010, Alan McKinnon wrote: > > Apparently, though unproven, at 20:19 on Tuesday 02 November 2010, Volker > > > > Armin Hemmann did opine thusly: > > > On Tuesday 02 November 2010, Stroller wrote: > > > > On 2/11/2010, at 10:46am, Alan McKinnon wrote: > > > > > ... > > > > > hard links will only work if /etc/portage and /var/lib/portage are > > > > > on the same filesystem. Frequently, they are not. > > > > > > > > For small values of frequently. > > > > > > > > Stroller. > > > > > > for every sane system out there. > > > > > > /var is a candidate for surprisingly filling up / to 100% so it is a > > > smart and sane choice to put it on its own partition where damage will > > > be reduced to some log files or an aborted emerge. > > > > You're both right, but for different reasons. It'd done less often on a > > laptop or personal machine than on a server for instance. And on embedded > > stuff, almost never. Example: Any junior of mine who doesn't make /var > > separate is liable to be served his own testicles for dinner, and they > > know it. But my laptop is one big filesystem. One case definitely needs > > it, the other one doesn't really. > > > > You're probably looking at the same question from entirely different > > needs and viewpoints. > > I am looking at the question from the viewpoint of a person who was hit > very hard in the past. Surprise / fillup thanks to /var or /tmp is no fun > at all. I feel your pain. I know it well. That's why I mentioned roasted testicles. Right now I sit with 60+ SLES 9 machines that cannot be taken offline for any reason, and EVERY SINGLE ONE has one giant filesystem except for the database partitions - those are /dev/sdb in a RAID. I cannot fix this and still maintain my SLA because a) you can't reduce a mounted fs b) you can't umount / c) all disk bays are full d) I don't have budget for bigger replacement drives e) there's no way I'm sitting in that freezing data centre for a week fiddling with disks, breaking RAID, putting bigger drives in, rebuilding RAID, fdisk, mkfs, blah, blah, blah. And with my luck, all of those machines will decide the stress of pulling drives will cause others to fail just at the exact point I don't have redundancy. How did this happen? The man in charge three managers ago thought this was a cool way to configure critical servers. Because "One filesystem mounted at /" was option #1 on the disk page of the SLES install wizard. And lets not talk about the abuses /tmp can be subject to... <sigh> <rant over> -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
