Rick Moen wrote: > Quoting Tim Riley ([email protected]): > >> thereby making partitioning decisions a thing of the past. > > Ha-ha! > http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten/Linux/FAQs/partition.html
Heh, yeah looks like the past to me, it was written in 2000 and shows it. While this is a rather personal preference, many of the ideas that led to the 5-6 partitions as standard operating procedure are gone. Some of those ideas that are no longer true: * file systems that didn't scale to large sizes well * lack of journals that lead to long fsck times * Rare/expensive unix systems that ran tons of services and had shells for users. Which required protecting services from users and vice versa. * Crude partition based backups * The lack of online resizing and logical volumes * Multiple swap partitions because of limitations on swap size partitions. * Horrifyingly poor security defaults * ram was so expensive you usually didn't have enough to reasonably buffer * file systems that often resulted in poor locality, so partitions were used to keep the head more local when processing a news spool or the like. * Installing 2 or more OSs on a single machine was rare. * the lack of device, pty, /proc, tmpfs and other related virtual or temporary filesystems that help offload the duties and security privs required of a filesystem. In today's world I'd recommend: * If you have a critical service don't run it on a machine with shell users on it. For a mail server keep the account info in the mail system, don't give users shell accounts on the same machine. Replace /var/spool/mail with imap. Use a VM if you have to. Besides local users can DoS you even with different partitions. * Only make a /boot if your / is something that's hard to boot, exotic file systems, RAID 5, LVM, etc. Otherwise skip it. * Swap justifies a partition, I don't really track how much I use, when a 1000GB costs $90 for 3 years I don't quibble over 1/2 ram vs same as ram. BTW, lagging because of swap is more about the rate of swapping than the amount you are using. * While most distributions are pretty good at upgrades, if you have directories that you want to survive the upgrade put them all in a single partition. Popular candidates for this are /opt or /home. * if the machine has a single dedicate purpose put that on a partition, /mirror for a webserver serving as a mirror, /mail for a mail server or related, and /share for a file server. Thus everything dedicated to that single purpose is in a single place, and when you want to reinstall you can just preserve that partition and resize as necessary. * If at all possible avoid extended partitions, they can complicate things as the names change when you change things. For instance on a default ubuntu box: tmpfs on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755) varrun on /var/run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755) varlock on /var/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,mode=1777) udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755) tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) lrm on /lib/modules/2.6.28-11-generic/volatile type tmpfs (rw,mode=755) proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620) fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw) securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw) rpc_pipefs on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw) nfsd on /proc/fs/nfsd type nfsd (rw) binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) All without a single partition ;-). Sure 6 partitions will work fine, it just tends to make more busy work, complicated partition tables, fstabs, the risk of one of your 6 slices being too small, god forbid you install a 2nd OS and need 6 more partitions.... or need to rebuild your partition table from scratch. For that reason I recommend nice big round numbers when creating partition tables. Like say a 300GB disk with 2GB for swap, 10% for /, and the rest for /home. Even combining /home with / isn't so bad, it does make a complete reinstall either trickier or riskier. Oh, btw, seems pretty common these days to wipe /tmp on boot, even if you don't use tmpfs. _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
