DJA wrote:
Ralph Shumaker wrote:
DJA wrote:
Which is why I don't like the GUI tool's automatic numbering scheme.
BTW, I don't ever remember having this problem with RH9 and earlier.
RH9 is where I did it (on my PC, the special group with no user that
is).
I have such groups also. But I always look at /etc/groups and
/etc/passwd to make sure that I am not creating a UID for a new user
which corresponds to the GID for userless group. That is, even though
a group has no corresponding user, I pretend it does.
If you avoid it as a rule anyway, then why not go ahead and create a
UID:GID pair, just without a home directory? If I had been thinking
then the way I think now, then I would have done so with my special
group. Although I still don't know how to create a full-function GID
and just use up its corresponding UID without anything else normally
belonging to the UID.
If you have only one big partition then
o If your partition gets messed up bad, you lose *everything*[1].
o If your / (root) partition gets messed up bad, you lose
*everything*[1].
o When you do upgrades of your distro, you have to restore *all* data
and /home directories if you reformat [2].
o It's more difficult to reallocate space from over-allocated
directories to under-allocated directories (e.g. you just ran
out of space in /tmp because the latest distro upgrade needed
five more gigabytes in /usr ).
This last item sounds like a reason *for* one big partition. Or at
the very least, this last item sounds like an argument for resizable
partitions as opposed to solid partitions. Can an LVM span drives?
You don't always have control over how your drive is filled if
everything is on one partition. If you write a document in OOo which
fills the last available byte on /home/joeuser, only /home is affected
if /home is on its own partition. If /home just sits as a directory on
the same single partition as /tmp and /var/log then you've just
written to the last available byte on the hard drive and the next log
entry or cron job (dbupdate, makewhatis) stops everything except the
platters.
Yeah, I actually ran across that one time, back in the day when I had
_zero_ *nix knowledge (working in PC repair). It was on a Xenix
system. Tech support for that machine had a *much* easier time
explaining to me how to "rm -rf /var/log" (or something to that effect)
than to the secretaries there. Actually, my *nix knowledge was not
/actually/ _zero_. I was at least aware of the danger and power of "rm
-rf". And I remember relating my caution to the tech support guy and he
explained that the command was not nearly so dangerous as not getting
"/var/log" right. Nevertheless, I was a nervous bunny as my finger
reached for the enter key.
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