On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 18:25 -0500, Michael P Angell wrote: > Pretty much a partitioning question. 2 or 6 partitions? Usage and or > benefit of higher lower number of partitions? Didn't Red Hat install > multiply partitions in earlier versions? It used to, and still does. The number of them has changed. ;-) As others have pointed out, there's advantages to having separate /, /boot/ and /home/ partitions. I have more partitions, still. Since I have a large drive, with oodles of space, I didn't worry too much about one of them being filled up. I included separate partitions for the following mount points, and there's a few reasons why you might do that listed along with them (my own, and traditional reasons). Naturally, not all reasons are applicable to all situations. /tmp - It doesn't seem so much of an issue with Linux, but on another system, lots of programs were always making lots of little temporary files. That does add to drive fragementation, and it's better not to fragment a partition that you want good speed with. Sometimes it's convenient to be able to wipe out old temporary files when booting up a system that's gone doolally. Reformatting a /tmp partition can be easier than trying to wildcard delete scads of files, if there's enough for the command to be too long to execute. Amongst other things, this gets used for creating ISO files for burning discs, it needs to be big enough to hold them plus other temporary files. If you had a system that made heavy use of temp files, you might even use a separate drive for it, so the system can use both drives simultaneously, instead of consecutively. Having this as a separate mount makes it easy to apply restrictions to it, so that doesn't allow execution of files on it, etc., that's an aid against some security flaws with some software (e.g. some webservers). /usr - Files in here aren't usually needed to boot a system, it's additional files for what you do with your system (e.g. non-OS, ancillary stuff). Having it separate can help with some recovery operations. It can even be network mounted, so that one installation of software is shared between terminals as if each had the same set of software installed. Having this as a separate mount makes it easy to apply restrictions to it, e.g. as a write-protected partition, etc., that's an aid against some security flaws with some software. /var - Files in here may change a lot, using a separate partition would help with fragmentation issues (NB: I've already said this isn't much of an issue with Linux). If you had a system that made heavy use of files in /var, you might even use a separate drive for it, so the system can use both drives simultaneously, instead of consecutively. Having this as a separate mount makes it easy to apply restrictions to it, so that doesn't allow execution of files on it, etc., that's an aid against some security flaws with some software (e.g. some servers). -- [tim@bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr 2.6.22.5-76.fc7 i686 i386 Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5. Today, it's FC7. Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
