-----Original Message-----
From: mark stevens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Shawn McMahon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wednesday, June 10, 1998 11:24 AM
Subject: Re: Newbe: Partition recommendations?
>Having your main parition crash just once will give you the answer to this
>question.
I've seen main partitions crash on everything from Unix to NT to OS/400, and
I still say that for a lot of people, creating a seperate /home is going to
cause more problems that it solves.
For others, such as an ISP's shell server, it's practically a necessity; but
for Joe Sixpack who just bought Linux to put on his home PC, and who isn't
going to be installing anything in /home except a few dotfiles to configure
his applications, it's less than useless.
After all, which way is he more likely to run out of space in /:
If he's got his whole drive devoted to it, or if he's got a bunch of empty
space on /home that'll never be used, and isn't available to /?
When some newbie asks us a question, we ought not to be saying "this is how
my drive is partitioned" if we're running systems that are devoted to tasks
his shouldn't be.
If you've got 500 users on your Linux system, and they're writing big
programs and compiling them in their home directories, it absolutely makes
sense for you to have a seperate /home partition. Heck, it may make sense
for you have that partition on a stripe set or a RAID 5 array.
But if it's just you, me, and baby makes three, then /home is going to use
an unpredictable amount of space, and you can't plan for it.
If my /home ordinarily takes up 10Mb, and then one time I need to create a
650Mb ISO9660 image in it, I'm in much better shape if I put it on / than if
I tried to decide how much to assign to /home.
After all, in this scenario if I'd assigned 150Mb to it it wouldn't have
been enough, but if I assigned 1Gb to it I'd be wasting 990Mb most of the
time.
So which is the right answer? Both? Neither?
I say neither, and this is exactly the kind of usage pattern you'll see in a
personal, home-use system. It's unpredictable, and maybe today I need a
bunch of space for /home but tomorrow I'll need it all for /.
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