Strategy for /tmp and /home Partitioning

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2005-10-13 at 09:31 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
> Marcin Struzak wrote:
> > [...snip...]
> > 
> >> Well, you have a passion for partitions that I do not have.
> >> Partitions have existence due to two things
> >> (1) limited addressing ability in the BIOS
> >> (2) desire to run multiple OS on the same disc
> > 
> > 
> > Not true, partitions' foremost reson to exist is the necessity to 
> 
> Sorry, I was speaking of how they came to be historically, not
> what other uses people have found for them.
----
not sure that I really want this thread to continue but...

historically, I have gathered that the different structures were
separated for security purposes. If you run say a web server that
collects data and writes it to /tmp, you would probably have noexec set
on /tmp so that nothing could be executed from there.

And anyone who has turned on verbose logging or run a mail server has
likely seen the value of having /var on it's own partition. If /var
fills, you still have a running system. If the root directory fills,
system shuts down.

But partitions are simply logical divisions. Whether the logical
divisions are partitions on one hard drive (or RAID array of many hard
drives) or separate hard drives is merely a semantic issue - we are
talking about logical partitions.
----
> 
> > separate parts of the filesystem that grow at different rates and that 
> > are of different criticality to the system; on a server /var is separate 
> > from /, so that if your print spool queue goes bananas and fills up the 
> > entire disk-space (in its partition), it does not affect the rest of the 
> > system. You can set-up user quotas to limit the growth of /home, but on 
> > a large network with many users /home would certainly be mounted 
> > separately from a volume manager that can be grown on-the-fly.
> 
> IMO, given the price of discs these days, that is better handled by
> separate discs, rather than partitions.
----
I think you are looking at this from a narrow focus. The OS tries to
give you flexibility for different and ever adapting situations.
----
> 
> > I thought you did say before, that you don't want the CD images from 
> > /tmp to use up space in /.  That's why you are moving it off to a 
> > different partition.
> 
> Erm, no. I'm not moving to a "different partition". I'm moving to a
> different disc. Not the same thing. If it weren't for the current
> load of software in existence which *insists* on having a partition,
> on a disc, even if it's all one big giant piece, and not really
> being split up, I wouldn't need a partition on the new disc. That is
> an historical anomaly.
----
you are focused on semantics - and to be semantically more correct, you
can't make use of any hard drive unless it were partitioned. But again,
once you deal with the physical disk and partitioning, we really are
discussing logical divisions.

Craig


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.