On Sun, Nov 28, 1999 at 01:54:54PM +0800, Niclas Hedhman wrote:
>
> I have a follow-up question...
> Being utterly uncertain of the sizes of the different parts of my file system,
> why should I partition it at all (I understand the Swap issue)??
>
> What is the down-side of having a single large partition? Please elaborate,
> because I can't see it.
>
> Niclas
>
> Shaggy Im-erbtham wrote:
>
hmm...
here's the reasons I can think of for breaking up your filesystem
a small /boot at the beginning of the disk for kernels can be a good
idea, if you are on an older bios where it won't do LBA translations,
as LILO can't boot kernel that aren't within the first 1024 blocks.
I generally keep /home mounted seperatedly because I fill it up, and
that way I've just filled up /home, not the root filesystem. Generally
I either fill it up in /home/ftp or my home directory, then I can just
mount another partition on whatevers full and copy stuff over without
stopping the system.
Another reason for a small / filesystem is if your box crashes. 3 out
4 linux boxen I have crash on a semi-regular basis. I kick the power out from
my laptop when there's no battery, I've got one with a screwy motherboard
than seems to lock up when I do big copies off the CDROM drive, and I've
got one that I'm trying kernel modifications on. Anyhoo... If it crashes,
you'll have fsck the root filesystem before you can even get to single user
mode... 200 megs takes a lot less time than 8 gigs.
The other one i do is /tmp. I get the impression that a lot off buffer
overflow security holes end up writing a rootshell into /tmp. If it's
mounted noexec, they have a root shell, but they can't execute it. There
may be ways to get around this for a cracker, but I believe it helps stop
the run of the mill variety.
Last, I like a /var for logs. Sometimes something goes wrong and lots of
logs get generated really fast. There's a bug in Internet Explorer than
can cause it to issue several thousand http get's per minute. This can
fill up a filesystem fast, and if everything is one big partition, that's
your root filesystem. If there is no space left on / it can bring a system
to its knees. Some vi's won't work without room for a scratch file in
/tmp. There's probably other stuff that goes wrong when / is full, but
it's not coming to mind.
please feel free to correct me if there are any glaring mistakes
hope this helps
greg
--
this is not here
