Joel Hammer wrote: > I mount things like /var and /home under /mnt/hda4/var and /mnt/hda4/home because my >/ > partition on /dev/hda1 ran out of room. /opt would reside on my root partition, > and there just wasn't enuf room for it. Thus, I need symbolic links in / to > point to those other directories on different partitions. It never occurred to me > that there was some other way of doing it. > Joel
If you make separate partitions for var, home, opt, usr, whatever, then you can mount each at the appropriate place in /. That's the typical way it is done, and why you are getting questions about using links. Your method has the advantage that you don't need separate partitions. If hda4 contains both var, and usr, for example, then mounting it to / hides the other things there. So you mount it to /mnt/hda4 and link /var to /mnt/hda4/var. This seems pretty close to what you did. Then you don't have to decide how to spilt your free space between usr and var, especially if you aren't sure how each will grow (which is probably typical of home users new to Unix). As I mentioned, the bind option to mount can do this too, but it is a 2 step process because you can't tell mount about your var directory on hda4 until it is mounted. It would look like this: mount /dev/hda4 /mnt/hda4 mount --bind /mnt/hda4/var /var (and optionally, umount /mnt/hda4) Of course the real problem is the hassle of rearranging things when partitions fill up. The luxury of > 50% free disk space makes this minor, but that's a luxury. What's really needed is a volume manager like LVM. I tried it a few months ago and it works well enough, but I had trouble resizing filesystems, which for me was the whole point. At some point I will try to use it again and spend some time debugging. Here's a link for more info: http://www.sistina.com/products_lvm.htm Dave _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
