On Mon, 20 Dec 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> Separate /home, /usr, /var etc.... make sense in a networked environment.
> For example, consider a case where we have swap, /, /usr/, /home, /var.
>
> Now i as a network admin will take great care about backing up /home (more
> care than other backups :-) anyway). Infact i could have it on a different
> harddisk (if i have so many users) or even another computer. I will mount
> this /home everytime.
How would you keep it on another computer? You may have to your NFS in
that case. I'm not too sure about that. Exporting file systems read
write is pretty insecure. It means that anyone can remotely mount that
drive provided he has access to some account (even guest). I read
something about this at http://blacknemesis.org/ You should also check out
SATAN.
> Now if i screw up my system (somehow) or i want to to a complete reinstall,
> i unmount /home, replace my system and remount it again. Done !!
Don't do a reinstall though, because that would recreate /home. Ofcourse,
you could just delete everything under /home and then remount
/dev/<homepartn> onto /home
> I saw a post telling to mount / as readonly from your prompt. I dont think
> it is possible. Because, things are being written to /proc, /var/logs,
True, it is not possible to mount / readonly. When drives are mounted,
mount writes to /etc/mtab There are also a lot of other status files that
are written to regularly.
you could have /var on a separate partition, but even that has to be
read-write because of /var/log and /var/lock
> wtmp, utmp all the time. You will have to boot linux from a floppy and
> mount the / partition on the harddisk as readonly to be able to do an fsck.
You could boot single user and remount / readonly.
> <joke>
> Another way to run fsck is to crash your system by just pressing the reset
> switch which we are used to in windoze. Guaranteed fsck done !!!! ;-)
> </joke>
That explains it then. Windows crashes so that people can run scandisk.
Philip
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