[H-GEN] partitioning again

[Robert Brockway]

(Note reply-to: being general at humbug.org.au vs Robert Brockway <robert at blake.humbug.org.au>)

On Wed, 12 May 1999, James McPherson wrote:

> Robert, I don't like the idea of having a single partition per disk if you
> just have one disk - there are too many opportunities for grievous failure if

I only do this with non-integral systems for the most part, or systems
that are dangerously short of disk space.  I am aware of the potential
danger - thats why blakw has the partition scheme it does.

> you get it wrong, and if you get an error when fscking then you'd stand a
> better than even chance (imho) that your system would be rendered dangerously
> unstable if not actually unusable. Of course, my perspective is skewed
> somewhat by the fact that I'm working with oracle databases and a large user
> population, but I think safety (paranoia even!) and established norms are
> useful to adhere to. As a frinstance, a while ago we had to replace the disk
> that our main mail partition was on because it was getting serious read/write
> errors. If that had been our / partition we would have had to take the machine
> down to poweroff - but instead we were able to merely turn off mail delivery
> while we plugged in a new disk and restored from the previous night's backup
> and then recovered what we could from the old disk. The benefit is obvious for 
> systems with large user populations. For a home system, well, it depends I
> guess on just how close to the edge you wish to live ;)

Yep, I mentioned a similar advantage in my original mail - problems
with the root partition are alot harder to deal with than problems
elsewhere.
Cheers,
	-Robert

--Robert Brockway B.Sc.  Email: robert at blake.humbug.org.au
                                robert.brockway at uq.net.au
			 WWW:   http://www.oc.humbug.org.au/~robert
			 Founder of HUMBUG (http://www.humbug.org.au)


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