--On Tuesday, May 27, 2003 08:12:02 PM +0200 Per Olofsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I have not said anything about /var. It should of course be a separate filesystem.
And /home, which should be on a server anyway.
The benefit being that processes running amok are somewhat corralled,
What do you mean?
If you have a process that fills up your file system, for example, you have a better chance of surviving if it's just one local file system and not the whole local disk. Excessive logging in /var comes to mind. I also had issues with file system corruption before, where I was quite happy that only one file system blew up (/var in this case) and not the whole box. Yes, both of these examples happen to be /var, which you agree should be separate anyway.
backups and restores are easier,
Why?
You will end up with more, but smaller save sets. Allows for faster (parallel) backups and restores and you can adjust the schedules individually. Backup products that work on a file level don't care, obviously. Also, see the above comment. Smaller likelihood of having to do complete system restores ;-)
and you have the ability to mount /usr read-only.
You can mount root (/) read-only. Almost, at least. Some programs write to /etc but that is, in my opinion, wrong. Fortunately they are quite few in Debian.
I don't use Debian, so I have no reason to doubt that this is true. I have seen plenty of systems though that expect writable space in all sorts of locations in the hierarchy.
I would agree with the statement that local file systems that can be mounted read-only and that have a predictable size, could use a single partition. Of course, if they are read-only, one should look at whether they could also be on a server.
Alex.
