[PLUG] puzzle of the day - unpuzzled

chris mccraw gently at gmail.com
Sun Feb 10 22:58:43 UTC 2008


On 2/10/08, Michael Rasmussen <mikeraz at patch.com> wrote:

> Which raises the question:  do you partition your drive or just have a all
> encompassing root?  If it's all one big one consider that LVM has taken
> the pain of wrongly sized partitions out of life.

I'm kind of old fashioned and kind of new fashioned:

i typically have a minimal / that i mirror on a separate disk for easy
disaster recovery, and the rest of the disk goes into /spoo or
/usr/local (and i religiously tune2fs -r 0).  then i try like hell not
to fill / =)

this has required some creative linking on a few systems where i
underplanned (my original gentoo setup needed less than 300M of system
files, but it balooned once i started using it as a desktop), but it
works out ok, and the big win is that when i reinstall, i say "yes,
reformat /" yet my data lives on.

i don't use LVM on PC's, since i might theoretically want to move the
disks around, say to a windows machine.  i love LVM on machines i
won't ever want to move the disks around on, though.  it was just
about the only saving grace of my time with AIX 3..

the old days of separate /var|/tmp/|/boot are fondly remembered but
not so necessary for the most part in these days of huge disk.  sure,
occasionally some looping service fills up /var (which is part of /)
with logs, but i tend to notice pretty quick when that happens.  i
haven't had any filesystem corruption in many moons.  i'm going to
blame ext[23]fs for being good to me and my hardware for being
non-flakey for that one.

the cool thing about unix is that there are still room and reasons for
every philosophy under the sun.  my way seems to work for me and my
employers =)



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