On Fri, Dec 01, 2000 at 05:11:13AM -0800, Lazar Fleysher wrote: > > Hi Everybody, > > This question has been a topic of many discussions but I still do not > understand the reason why people suggest to have separate partitions of > /usr > /usr/local/ > > In early days when disks were small, this was the only choise, but now, > why do not just have a 1 - 2G partition for the system and other > partitions for other things as needed?
a seperate partition for /usr/local is useful so you can do a clean install of the rest of the system without trashing /usr/local, or mucking with tarring it into /home or such. seperating /usr /var /tmp and /home keeps your root filesystem small and static reducing the chances of it ever becomming corrupted. this also has security benifits since ordinary users have no write permission to the root partition any longer (through /tmp /home or /var) otherwise they could completely fill up the root partition which tends to cause corruption and other Bad Things. speaking from experience having all /var /tmp /home /usr /usr/local and /var/tmp seperated makes recovering from filesystem corruption much simpler, if i had gone the MS style `one huge bloated all encompassing / partition' i would have lost alot of configuration and user data several times now. (i have a particular machine that must have a buggy IDE chipset or something) another advantage of having /usr and /usr/local on seperate partitions is you can mount them read-only which saves alot of fsck time if the machine is shut off improperly or every 20th boot if you shutdown at night. since /usr is the largest filesystem it takes the longest to fsck. keep / small 64MB is way more then enough, split off everything else: /var /home /usr and /tmp at a minimum, splitting /usr/local and /var/tmp is also a good idea. IMO -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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