[H-GEN] Need help during install, or just after ;)

[Andrae Muys]

On Thu, 11 Jun 1998, Martin Pool wrote:

> >"small" because nothing will stop a Unix system in its tracks faster thana
> >corrupt / FS.  Unix will generally handle a corrupt anything else in its
> >stride, but a corrupt / really makes it cross.  So the lore I mentioned
> >above suggests making / small.  So what is "small".  Well zen has 20mb
> >while blake has 15mb,  I could prob squeze both down to 10mb.
> 
> However, a contrary rule of thumb is that it's good to have lots of 
> free space on /, in case e.g. you need to use it while recovering
> from some problem.  So, I tend to make them ~100MB (on large disks),
> but with mostly free space.

I'm sorry but I can't agree with this.  ~100Mb is ~80Mb more chance of
corrupting /.  If you want extra space for use recovering from problems,
keep an empty 80Mb Partition around somewhere, you can mount it if you
need it (and if you can't mount it, it wasn't going to help you anyway).

On a FHS compliant linux system, the directories under / are:

/bin
/boot
/dev
/etc
/home
/lib
/mnt
/proc
/root
/sbin
/tmp
/usr
/var

IMO /home should _always_ be a seperate partition (unless the system won't
have any users).

Regardless I put the following on /.

bin, sbin, lib, boot, dev, etc, root, mnt.

mnt is empty, dev really only takes inodes not space, bin and sbin are
both small (most stuff should be in /usr/bin, /usr/sbin).  boot is really
only as large as the kernel images you keep there, etc is almost
exclusively text files.  Really the only largeish directory under / is
/lib, and that's only 11Mb (mainly unstripped (it's a devel system, the
symbols can be useful)).

The rest of the system I typically arrange as at least two more
partitions.

My current system has

/
/home
/home/ftp
/usr
/usr/local (/opt is a symlink to /usr/local/opt)
/var (/tmp is a symlink to /var/root-tmp)
+ about another half dozen partitions doing various things unrelated to
the basic system.

> >They have seperate partitions for /tmp /usr /var and /home (as well as a
> >/var/spool/news).
> 
> I'd agree.  Then symlink /tmp to /var/tmp and /usr/tmp as some
> silly programs insist on looking there.
> 
Actually I have a seperate directory under /var --- /var/root-tmp and /tmp
is a symlink to it.  Yeah I could have a seperate /tmp partition and go
the other way, but I really couldn't be bothered.


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Andrae Muys              "I have no wish to recite ... stratagems, for they
andrae at humbug.org.au     have all the same end in view, which is, to oblige
My stuff, Linux stuff        the enemy to make unnecessary marches in favor 
http://www.uq.edu.au/~cmamuys/   of our own designs." - Fredrick the Great.


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