On Wed, 15 Sep 1999, Jonathan Walther wrote: > drives. But given they are in such a vast minority, the current scheme of > providing sensible defaults and popping the installer into a tool for > creating your own arbitrary partition scheme is really the best. > (at least, Im ASSUMING we do that the same as FreeBSD... I haven't installed > Debian in a while. Just duplicated already working drives)
You say this, but all almost every single one of my drives >120MB (3.6GB, 6GB, 9GB, 13.5GB, 17GB) are partitioned into a single huge Linux partition (and 256MB swap) -- I thought and hard about this, and I have yet to have come across a time where having several partitions would have been easier. Initially, when I setup the first large multi-user system that I admin, I *did* split it into lots of little bits (on a 6GB disk). This was a *nightmare* -- bits of /usr were symlinked into /home; bits of /var were symlinked into /usr, and so on. I had constant nightmares trying to distribute the disk load evenly and ensure free space was there all around, so when I finally reinstalled it (after 4 years) with Debian, I left both of its disks as single huge partitions, so that it now has 8GB / and 6GB /home, and I've been happier. I'm not especially bothered about the fsck time -- this box goes down only 3 or 4 times a year, if that. Backups are taken (over the network), and if my data crashes on the system, then I'll reconstruct from that. With the (good) Debian policy of fully integrating packages into the /usr, /var tree (rather than just leaving them in a heap), saving /var at the expense of /usr wouldn't be terribly useful, anyway. So, er, what reasons are there (for me, at least, and I think I'm fairly typical of small--medium size system admins) for splitting? -- Chris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ( http://www.fluff.org/chris )
