Strategy for /tmp and /home Partitioning

[Mike McCarty]

Marcin Struzak wrote:

Thanks for your kind reply.

>> I guess I didn't make myself quite clear on this point. I want ONE (1)
>> ONE partition on the new disc. I don't want an explicit limit on either
>> /home or /tmp. I want them to share the disc. So a major part of my
>> question really revolves around whether I can make /tmp be a
>> soft link to /home/tmp when /home is a mount point for another
>> fs.
> 
> 
> I have never tried it, but I can't see why this cannot be done; both 
> /home and /tmp would be loaded from fstab, and should be available quite 
> early on. The only problematic moment is definitely at boot time, so the 
> good thing is that you'll find out something's screwed up at the first 
> reboot after repartitioning!
> 
> But -- just curious -- why would you want to do that this way?  I am 
> migrating my partitions to
> 
>   /
>   /boot
>   /usr
>   /home
>   /var
> 
> so that /tmp comes with /, and really is available right at the 
> beginning, when / is mounted; just like /etc.  I've also seen /usr/local 
> being loaded from another partition, and /opt, but these are more 
> Solaris-like setups, Fedora does not put much into /usr/local.

I suppose that your question is "Why do you not want /tmp on
the same partition as /etc and so on?"

I don't want errant programs filling up /tmp and making my
machine unbootable.

Also, as much as reasonably possible, I'd like to make as much of my
machine mounted read only, though this is more a long-range idea,
and not a special goal at present.

I'd like to have a small boot area and a large user area. If the
user area fills, then I want the system still sane, and able
to boot up and run a root login.

I want to be able to use /tmp for holding backups with CD as
eventual destination, and not overflow. Right now, I have one
disc 40GB with both Windows and Linux on it. Linux is living in
a 7G partition, and is just a little bit cramped.

$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5              7633264   5071656   2173860  70% /
/dev/hda3                99075     24602     69358  27% /boot
none                    124044         0    124044   0% /dev/shm

If I move /home and /tmp out, then Linux will get back about 3/8 G
and the pressure will be significantly eased for /home and /tmp.

$ du -s /home
440964  /home

But I expect /tmp to grow up to 7G or so during a backup. I don't want
all that space eaten in a fixed-size partition for three reasons:
(1) if the system grows much more, then I'd have to grow the partition
(2) I'd like to be able to reclaim the space for temp file growth in
     other parts of the directory tree
(3) if it works, I'd like to move some of /usr/local over to the new
     area as well, and I don't want to have to guess how large these
     areas may grow, so I don't want multiple partitions.

For similar reasons, I'm considering getting rid of a /swap partition
and moving /swap to a file. If I upgrade memory, I don't want to have
to fiddle partitions.

Just in case some might want to suggest LVM as a possible solution:

I'm not interested in LVM. Not now, and possibly not ever. I have one
machine with FC4 installed on it. During install FC4 automagically put
LVM on there, and it's caused problems which I don't want to go into
here and don't want to repeat. Suffice it to say that, at present, if
LVM went away permanently, then I for one would not miss it. I'd redo
the install if it didn't take four hours, and I'd have to make a massive
backup and restore, which would also take a lot of time (~40GB of
data, which I'd have to put on CDs and then pull back off).

Mike
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