On Thu, Jan 01, 1998 at 12:21:02AM -0600, Bill Layer wrote: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Time to set the clock! > At 09:18 AM 1/15/02 -0600, you wrote: > > >> Don't disk quotas do a better job of that? > >> > > > >Perhaps in /home, but another poster mentioned /var... > > There are several good reasons to partition a drive. Here are a few in no > particular order; > > 1) some partitions get a lot of read/write access, while others do not. > It's nice to keep them separate so that there are no unnecessary write > operations (and hence fragmentation) of partitions that can do without. Urm, fragmentation is more a function of the filesystem, as I understand it. When you do async writes, you can sort them out before they hit the platter. (Someone that knows better, please throw your dough in.) > 2) it is very useful to have /boot on it's own partition, so in the event > that the root partition is corrupted, the system is still bootable without > repair disks (like Tom's). I have also heard of critical systems having > several redundant /boot partitions. Well, I haven't seen a corrupted partition in a zillion years, but a boot and swap partitions are the only ones that I think are keepers. I would rather have a lot of 2-4GB drives than anything over 10GB. [Purely personal opinion]. Here's what I'm currently going with: Each drive is done this way: /dev/sd<x>1 5MB boot partition sometimes FAT16 < 32M for AlphaBIOS /dev/sd<x>2 128MB swap /dev/sd<x>3 remainder (whatever) Any disk can boot, there will always be swap (128MB increments just make sense for my boxes right now.) I'm going to play to see about optimizing swap by having more small swap files, but on other systems I've used in the past that's a good technique to spread I/O. Does anyone know if symlinks cause additional overhead? I presume not and that the symlink is in effect when a file/stream is opened, so there should be no degradation in I/O to a symlink. Boy is that distant past info for me -- help (before I just make some (time consuming) measurements.) I am not being as pragmatic as Mr. Trammell, ;), but just put root on one drive, and create symlinks to wherever I want for /home, /var, or whatever else. You can update them later without having to repartition if you get too big. It's not as good as LVM, but doesn't have the kernel baggage, either, nor does it require me to spend more time learning admin tricks. LVM *has* to have _some_ overhead, no? > 3) it's also useful to have /home or /usr on their own partitions, so that > they can easily be grown as the system expands. /usr can get very large, > and /home might also if suddenly the number of users needs to > increase. Hrm -- how does the number of users increase *suddenly?* -- on a private net? "You tell 2 friends, and they tell 2 friends, ... uh oh -- 1024 new friends! Now I need new disk space!" No, I think my new rule will be "You can have an account on my system, but you have to provide your own home drive." (OK, now I'm just being silly.) > Nice to just add a new 90GB disk and mount it to /home... And once again, > on a system that is getting no new software, the content of /usr is usually > static and may be mounted read-only. can't do that if /usr is on the / > partition. Sure can. cp and symlink. > 4) I like to keep several partitions open after a setup, which may at any > time be committed to different jobs. More mp3 space, another operating > system, a native disk for VMware etc. > > Hope some of these made sense! They did/do. I just like talking about drives this week. -- www.rephil.org "Trying to do something with your life is like sitting down to eat a moose." --Douglas Wood