On Feb 9, 2004, Paul Jakma <paul(a)dishone.st> wrote:
Ditto, hence why stuff like /usr should not be on root.
Yeah, and /var, etc. I just find it too much of a hassle to keep it
all out of /. I used to arrange things like that back in another life
as a Solaris sysadmin, but then I'd run out of partitions faster than
I'd like. And then, reinstalling things onto a single root filesystem
is no big deal anyway. Much simpler than having to create a bunch of
new root partitions and other LVs just to do a fresh install on the
same box.
How do resize your root though?
Booting into another installed OS is the easiest way for me, but
there's always the rescue CD.
Eg, I can resize /usr without rebooting.
That's something desirable, indeed. I may considering setting up a
separate partition for /usr in the future.
There are other benefits too, eg, the smaller and simpler root is,
the lower the likelihood of (hopefully rare) software bugs in fs
code hitting my root partition, statistically one would hope these'd
be exposed in other bigger and more heavily used partitions than the
smallest (and rarely written to) partition on the machine.
To enjoy this benefit you *really* need a separate /var too. And
unfortunately a significant number of low-level stuff writes to /etc
and /dev (lvm and dhcp's resolv.conf munging come to mind)
It's always been best practice to use minimal root fses, i
thought?
I've always recommended minimal /boot, user stuff in a separate /home
or however you want to name it, and the OS stuff in a single
partition. It's simple to manage, and is likely to keep the OS more
efficient in the long run; fragmenting the root filesystem into
multiple partitions tends to generate additional hard disk head
movement. Of course the same goes for a separate /home partition, but
you really don't want to do without that!
--
Alexandre Oliva Enjoy Guarana', see
http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Happy GNU Year! oliva(a){lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Red Hat GCC Developer aoliva(a){redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist Professional serial bug killer