On Tue, 1 Feb 2011, John H. Robinson, IV wrote: > Aaron McCaleb wrote: >> On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 15:43, Michael Ryder <mryder1...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> Incidentally... there has got to be a repository somewhere of *nix >>> best practices? ?Is there? >> >> If there is, then as Dave hinted, I would guess at least 70% of the >> information in such a collection is out of date. > > I was looking for Best Practices on file system layout. Gone are the > days of separate spindles, and small hard rives, and limiting file > systems to the size of a single tape. Also gone is giving a random drive > error as small / target as possible: smart controllers and RAID greatly > minimises the effects of errors. Even the cylindrical limitations of > boot loaders is passe. > > All the Best Practices on the topic I found seemed to be about a decade > old. This was of little help to me. > > Taking all those into consideration, we decided on three partitions: /, > /home, and swap. The idea is to eventually move /home to a filer, > leaving us with / and swap. > > It feels wrong to do that on a server, but I can't find any reason why > this is bad anymore. I swallowed my distaste, and blessed the minimal > partitioning scheme (we were using up to thirteen defined partitions, > plus one for disk as we placed a swap on every spindle we could). > > In before: > /var: logs go to central log server, rotated out on local systems > quickly > /var/tmp & /tmp: tmpfs
the main arguments that I have heard about having lots of partitions nowdays is that you can play games with mount permissions (no setuid, no dev on paritions writeable by users), but I don't think there are very many systems being run that way anymore. The bulk of the systems are not multi-user shells, they are dedicated servers that only the admins login to . In my experiance, the headaches of finding that some of the paritions are the wrong size and need to be adjusted (even with LVM on linux and the equivalent on AIX), far outweighs any benifits. That said, I actually split /var from / and have two / paritions on my system. That way when I do a major OS upgrade I install it onto the second / partition and change the bootloader, while sharing /var can lead to some headaches, In practice I've found that they are pretty minor (and can be avoided with moving /var to /var/old.var. If there is a problem, I can always reboot into the old /, flip the /var data, and be exactly where I was before (I had to do this in one case where the new kernel didn't have drivers for one oddball system, reverting to the old system was 5 min, and only that long because it took a while to reboot) with this arrangement, my default partitioning is swap 2G / 2G / 2G /var everything else with this approach, over the last decade I've gone from slackware to debian 3.0 to debian 3.1 to debian 5.0 (in most cases swapping out hardware somewhere along the line, but I've got some test boxes that are still on the ancient hardware) David Lang _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
