A bit perplexed...

[Scot L. Harris]

On Wed, 2005-02-09 at 19:53, Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> Here's something I've had a bit of a problem figuring out.
> 
> When someone says the "root filesystem", I automatically think of / and
> everything installed on it (/root, /usr, /etc, /var and so on, excluding
> of course /boot and swap) in one partition.

The root file system is the start of the directory tree, everything in
Linux/Unix is treated as part of the file system.

You will have a / file system and with linux normally you will have a
/boot  and /swap.  Each of these are typically separate file systems. 
You can have other file systems mounted under / such as /usr, /etc and
/var but you don't have to have these as separate file systems.

A file system is a distinct and separate partition on a harddrive.  One
file system can not spill over into another file system.  If /usr is
just a directory under / it is part of the root file system but is not a
file system itself, it is just a directory.  If you have specified a
partition and formated it and mounted that file system as /usr it is a
file system.

I am sure you will get a much better explanation.

As to a root failover scheme.  It sounds fairly complicated and
troublesome to maintain.  Not sure this would buy you much.  If you are
going that far it would be better to install a cluster solution with
good raid systems so if you lost any part of the main system there is a
standby system ready to take over.  Much cleaner and not problems with
figuring out what file systems go where.

Many disaster recovery schemes seem good up front but if they are to
complicated or only protect against one specific scenario it may not be
worth the effort.
 
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