partitioning scheme

[Mad Unix]

Okay, its clear now

On 11/6/07, Steve Phillips <steve at focb.co.nz> wrote:
> Mad Unix wrote:
> > what about /usr ?
>
> Did you not read what I said about it ?
>
>  > /usr  ------> SAN
>  >
>  > this is a _really bad_ idea.
>  >
>  > A lot of the time, you can get yourself in trouble if you are not
>  > exceptionally careful about what is called at boot, and these days a lot
>  > of stuff sits off /usr and you could accidentally isolate something that
>  > needs to be run to allow - say, the SAN to come online.
>  >
>  > Back in the day, people used to partition stuff lots simply because
>  > there was no such thing as a large hard drive (ok, this is not 100%
>  > correct, but pretty close) - a lot of people claimed it was for data
>  > retention incase of a system/drive crash, but seriously, how many people
>  > that claim this do you know that have HAD a headcrash on a drive and
>  > then tried to reconstruct data from the other segments of the drive -
>  > generally when a drive crashes it will take out pretty much all the of
>  > device rendering it ALL unusable. (and again, yes, at times you DO try
>  > to reconstruct the data but it is NOT a common event and you can cause
>  > more problems than you solve with this file system fragmentation that
>  > everyone seems dead keen on)
>  >
>  > Your best protection is NOT more partitions it is things like RAID (i'd
>  > mirror those two local disks) and good backups with a _tested_ restore
>  > process.
>
> Partitioning "because you can" is quite frankly, braindead. In the past
> there were very valid reasons for mounting lots of partitions all over
> the place, hard disk drives after all, were measured in 10's of _megs_
> in size, not in gigs. These days not so much.
>
> If someone can come up with a valid reason to partition to the nth
> degree, then sure - but until then - why bother ?
>
> The biggest example I can give is not that relevant to many OS's due to
> the modernisation of things, but the principle remains the same.
>
> <wee story>
> In Solaris 7 there was no bash shell, so a classic thing to do was to
> download and install bash from sunfreeware. This always installed to
> /usr/local/bin - and was quite happily the default shell for a lot of users.
>
> Someday, Mr Admin decided that the root /sbin/sh shell was a little
> plain, and with solaris, it will quite happily run with roots shell set
> to /usr/bin/bash
>
> until of course you setup /usr as a separate partition and reboot and
> then nothing mounts as we cannot find the initial shell to mount /usr
> and the system becomes quite nastily broken and can take many hours to fix.
> <end story>
>
> Now, if we take this principle further, while a base install today will
> have no problem running with /usr as a separate partition, is there
> anything to gain from this ? (keep in mind, we only ever do things for a
> reason, not just 'coz that's the way its done')
>
> Arguments for no /usr
> a) the system will run quite happily without a /usr on a seperate partition
>
> Arguments against a /usr partition
> a) you can at times accidentally render the system unusable (you rely on
> the fact that everything needed to start the system resides on / and
> nothing in /usr)
>
> The 'no /usr partition' argument seems to win out in my mind.
>
> If you (or anyone else) has some form of logic as to why a /usr
> partition is a good thing then I'm all ears.
>
> --
> Steve
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>
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-- 
madunix