Strategy for /tmp and /home Partitioning

[Mike Pepe]

Mike,

> 
> That is (almost) the situation I'm in, now. I've got /boot, /swap,
> and /. (Not counting removable medium devices.)
> 
> ]# fdisk -l
> 
> Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
> 16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 77545 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
> 
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hda1               1        8625     4346968+   b  W95 FAT32
> /dev/hda2   *        8626       60915    26354160    7  HPFS/NTFS
> /dev/hda3           60916       61118      102312   83  Linux
> /dev/hda4           61119       77545     8279208    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
> /dev/hda5           61119       76505     7755016+  83  Linux
> /dev/hda6           76506       77545      524128+  82  Linux swap
> 
> /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2 are Windows XP, /dev/hda3 is /boot,
> hda5 is /, and /dev/hda6 is /swap.

Ah, you'd have a lot more space if you got rid of that windows partition! :)

> I'm considering repartitioning and using a file for swap, rather
> than a separate partition. That would make the system somewhat
> more vulnerable to fs corruption, but I've read where file access
> is just as fast, and a file is easier to resize than a partition.

I'd go with the file too in your case, especially when you've got a 
couple of partitions unusable since they're for Windows.

> Partly, this is an exercise in exploring what can be done.

These sorts of things are the best teachers.

> My question really revolved around making /tmp into a soft link
> to /home/tmp on another disc. I was concerned with possible
> race conditions during boot. I've gotten good feedback on using
> a loopback mount rather than a soft link (which now that I have
> a better understanding of what a loopback mount is, makes sense)
> and some assurance that there would be no boot issues.

I'm sure that would work, I have no personal experience with that 
arrangement.

> How *do* you have your system set up?

Well it's a bit different than what you've got, but it looks like this:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/rd/c0d0p2         12G  5.0G  6.0G  46% /
/dev/rd/c0d0p1         99M   24M   75M  25% /boot
/dev/rd/c0d1p1         48G   23G   25G  48% /home
/dev/rd/c0d0p5        9.2G  2.5G  6.7G  28% /usr/local
/dev/rd/c0d2p1        291G  197G   95G  68% /shares
/dev/rd/c0d0p6         12G  157M   12G   2% /stuff
none                  2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm

It's on a hardware RAID, so c0d0 is the first "disk" (actually a RAID-1 
mirror of 2 disks) c0d1 is a 4 disk RAID-5, and c0d2 is a 10 disk RAID-5.

User data lives in /home and /shares, and I put anything I run that's 
not normal/stock Fedora stuff in /usr/local. That way if it blows up, it 
either (a) destroys/fills up /usr/local or (b) if I need to 
recover/reinstall I can reload the OS leaving all my custom stuff 
intact. The latter reason is also a compelling argument for a separate 
/home.

Incidentally some Unix flavors, particularly MP-RAS from NCR used the 
concept of more than one /usr partition for version migration and 
fallback- you could load a new version of the OS into a new slice 
(partition) and boot between the new and old to test and either migrate 
to or roll back from if testing goes badly. Kind of wish Fedora did that...

> I thought the way Solaris uses /usr/local is rather nice,
> actually.

Me too, I kind of emulate that a bit this way.

Hope that helps a bit

-Mike