On Mon, 2004-11-22 at 13:29 +0000, Paul Howarth wrote: > Graham Campbell wrote: > > I agree about the partitioning. The habit of splitting things into > > various partitions came from large multi-user systems where it has > > definite advantages. But for workstations, or other essentially single > > user systems it is definitely sub-optimal. Your experience is the exact > > problem - no space in one partition and space available in another but > > not usable. My advice is one partition per disk unless your hardware > > requires a /boot partition to guarantee the bootable images are at low > > disk addresses. > > One of the advantages of having separate partitions is that a runaway process > that (say) generates a huge file in /tmp or /home and fills up the filesystem > will not fill up the root filesystem if that is one a separate partition. > Filling up the root filesystem is certainly something to be avoided if possible. > > Using LVM gives most of the needed flexibility for partition resizing without > losing the "safety" of the separate partitions. > > Paul. > I would like to make a quick summary of this thread and make some additional comments. 1) Use lvm to handle partitioning problems. LVM is certainly a powerful new tool for this. But I think it is too new to have been fully explored. By this time next year the capabilities will have sunk in and probably a whole new strategy will emerge. 2) A separate /home partition makes clean installs easier. Good point. But my experience is that preserving the home directories is a small part of upgrading via a clean install. This can just as easily be done with tar or dump/restore. If you want ease of upgrading, don't try to be on the bleeding edge. Wait for things to quiet down and then do an upgrade, not a clean install. Much less work to find and fix /etc differences, and to add back in all the extra stuff you put into the last system. Of course, sometimes this is not possible, so you just have to make your own evaluation of where you would rather put your effort. 3) Separate partitions protects against runaway processes. Yes, this is one of the major arguments for doing it on multiuser, shared systems. But it almost never happens on a single user system. And if it does it is generally just an annoyance, not a disaster. You find the process that is filling a disk and figure out why and fix it. After all the initial message in this thread was about the frustration with filling up /. It was only in the early days that filling up a partition was a major problem. For quite a while now the system has tolerated filling up / pretty well. So I am off to learn more about lvm. I need it for other reasons, but am glad that it was pointed out as being a help in addressing the partitioning issue. -- Graham Campbell <gc1111@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
