Re: Partition sharing

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To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Date: Sun, 03 Aug 2003 15:26:07 +0200

Hello

Shawn Lamson (<shawn.lamson@verizon.net>) wrote:

> On Sun, August 03 at 8:25 AM EDT
> alex <radsky@ncia.net> wrote:

>>I have four Linux systems (two Debians) installed with all sharing a
>>single swap and a /home partition. (Don't ask why......it's just
>>because they were available..... but everything seems to work fine.)

> Cool it only makes sense to reuse swap space.

>>Question--what advantage or disadvantage would there be if multiple
>>Linux systems shared additional partitions such as /temp, /usr,
>>/var,......? Is this even practical?

> If you mean /tmp not /temp then I guess that is "sharable" without
> problems - I assume you have 4 different distros on one local box -
> not mounting drives from other machines, right?

Debian cleans /tmp by default at boot time anyway, so there will be no
problems sharing /tmp.

> I would stay away from
> /usr and /var as too many programs use them and if you install a
> program with
> distro specifc items you will definitely run into problems. I am sure
> someone will post specific problems for you :0

Most programs installed through package management go to /usr, so it is
in most cases somehow useles to use different installation if you use
the same /usr partition. Also, packages installed to /usr can depend on
libraries or programs that are installed in /lib, /bin or /sbin, and if
you mount /usr from another installation with different packages, some
programs maybe won't run because they cannot find libraries. Also
mounting /usr from Debian stable in an Debian unstable system would not
work very well because of library version incompatibilities (e.g.
glibc). You will have the same problems is you try to use /usr from an
recent RedHat, SuSE or Mandrake in Debian Woody.

Debian package management tools like apt and dpkg store information
about available and installed packages in /var, and your package
management will surely get confused if you install a package that
depends on a package not installed according to /var, but that is
already in /usr.

best regards
        Andreas Janssen

-- 
Andreas Janssen
andreas.janssen@bigfoot.com
PGP-Key-ID: 0xDC801674
Registered Linux User #267976
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