On Thu, Jun 10, 2004, Omer Zak wrote about "Optimal number of mount points (was: Re: Question on making the partitions)": > My opinion is different. > You should have several mount points, at least separate ones for /usr, > /tmp and /var. > The advantage is that if one partition gets destroyed, you lose only that > partition.
In my experience, this is not an important consideration for most setups. After all, if "only" your /usr partition gets destroyed, and /tmp and /var remain, what exactly did you gain? Moreover, these partitions are merely a figment of software imagination; Except in extremely rare cases of software bugs, usually when your hard disk gets destroyed, all the partitions can get damaged. > The apparent disadvantage of running out of space in one mount point is > not a real disadvantage, because you can always move subdirectories to > another partition, and symlink to it from the original (and full) > partition. Actually, it is a real disadvantage. A major disadvantage. For example, my previous how computer was a Pentium 500 MHz, with 12 GB of hard disk (if I remember correctly). This space was divided into, if I remember correctly, 3 partitions of 4 GB. Why? I don't even remember. Maybe it was to accomodate Windows which was once installed there, or maybe it was because someone told me that "PCs can't handle a partition larger than 4GB" or that "The larger the partition is, the more space is waited because the block size becomes huge". So, I had a "/" partition of about 4 GB, which originally was enough for /usr, /usr/local/, /home, and basically almost everything. But, as time progressed (I had this computer for 3 years), 4 GB was beginning not to be enough. Hardest was upgrading the Red Hat system on my machine - when it adds and removes RPMs, it needs some free space, so every time I upgraded Redhat (I did that about 5 times during the lifetime of that computer) I first had to remove a lot of big packages, and then do the upgrade, and then return those packages. At some point I moved /home and /usr/local to another partition, but at another point this was also not enough. I found myself movine large directories (like /usr/src) to another partition and using symbolic links, but again this caused problems during upgrades (because Redhat calculated the place it needs on the / partition, and did not notice the symbolic links to the other partition). And all this mess, for what? I never said to myself "boy, am I glad I have more than one partition". It caused me nothing but grief. So now I alway partition my disks with one huge partition (in addition to small /boot and swap partitions, of course). I recently created a 80 GB partition, and it seems to be working well. P.S. This description was of a single user machine. On a multi-user machine you might want to limit users more, so that for examples users going crazy in /tmp don't cause the mailboxes (in /var/mail) to fill up. Partitions may make sense in such cases, but not necessarily. Giving people quotas making them unable to fill up the disk is another solution. Of course, if you want different quotas in different directories, the need to create partitions arizes again. -- Nadav Har'El | Thursday, Jun 10 2004, 21 Sivan 5764 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Windows-2000/Professional isn't. http://nadav.harel.org.il | ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
