For the past several years I've been of the mindset that systems should be partitioned up by dividing the OS (the bits that make things go) from the data (the bits that you actually care about). So in the case of a webserver, /var/www would get its own partition and everything else would be on another partition (/). In the case of a shell server, /home would get its own partition and everything else would be on /. Obviously this shouldn't be a hard-and-fast rule; a fileserver may have user data in /var/samba and /home - which you could hardlink together, or make separate partitions for. The reasoning behind this is that if you have some sort of storage failure (filesystem corruption, disk failure, etc) you have either: 1. the OS to help recover the data OR 2. the data preserved and you just have to fix up the OS. This sort of partitioning scheme has saved me a number of times. The more partitions you have of course, the greater the likelihood that you'll run out of space on one of them. (LVM helps alleviate this, but isn't always the best choice when optimizing for the common case). -- Carl Soderstrom Systems Administrator Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com