> Kenneth Porter wrote: > > Thanks for your kind reply. > > > --On Tuesday, October 11, 2005 11:27 PM -0500 Mike McCarty > > <mike.mccarty@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > >> I guess I didn't make myself quite clear on this point. I want ONE (1) > >> ONE partition on the new disc. I don't want an explicit limit on either > >> /home or /tmp. I want them to share the disc. So a major part of my > >> question really revolves around whether I can make /tmp be a > >> soft link to /home/tmp when /home is a mount point for another > >> fs. > > > > > > Not a soft link but a loopback mount point. In /etc/fstab the entry > > would look like this: > > > > /home/tmp /tmp none bind 0 0 > > > > (This presumes that /home has already been mounted earlier in the file.) > > (Yes, that clearly would be necessary.) > > I'm afraid that, while I've used *NIX like systems for, well, > since at least 1984, I'm new to administration. I installed > FC2 back late last October, and just now learned enough about > the conventions about where things are stored to do my first > backup (using a script I developed) which I have some confidence > that I could recover a working system from, should the need > arise. > > So, though I'm familiar with the *term* "loopback", and I've mounted > ISO images using "the loopback device", I really am pretty much > clueless about what the term "loopback" refers to. I'm familiar with > both hard and soft links, however. > > Would you mind specifying what the distinction between > using a soft link and using a loopback mount would be? > And why one would prefer the latter to the former? > > Mike Okay, good question. We're about to head out the door on a trip so if I seem short it's "brevity", not shortness. Hopefully witty too. Loopback mounts are described a bit in the mount man page. The purpose is to let one directory appear to be in another place. The usefulness of this comes when some programs need to look at what directory tree they are in. If you're in a link, some will see the linked directory, some will see the linked to directory. So if you made a link of /tmp to /home/tmp, some programs might see you in /tmp, some in /home/tmp which is often not what you want. :) loopbacks avoid this. Is this a good idea for what you want? I think so. I normally use it for /var/spool/up2date to store rpms. I loop it over to my larger export directory and that way /var/ itself is a reasonable size that doesn't get filled if there are a lot of updated rpms. Just need to make sure your backups don't back up the same thing twice, if you can. Linux, from what I've seen, doesn't clean out /tmp. Sadly. I prefer that behavior, it is one of the things Solaris does that I like more than link. it sounds like your plan, modified with loopback instead of links, should work. ciao! leam
