Re: Can I make only 4 partition per hardrive?

From: Scott (scott_at_somewhere.invalid)
Date: 01/06/04 

Date: Tue, 06 Jan 2004 07:45:53 +0000

On Tue, 6 Jan 2004 16:01:46 +1100, "Leon."
<noemail@noemail.noemail.com> wrote:

>> >
>> >So just stick everything on one big partition , apart from swap, and
>forget
>> >it.
>>
>> That is just such bad advice, I scarcely know where to begin... Are
>> you aware of what happens when a partition *does* fill up? What if
>> something went out of control, and filled the /tmp directory? If
>> you're running a database, mailspool or anything else in the same
>> partition, you can say goodbye to all the data as the files are
>> truncated.
>
>
>ok, so I have the database files on a partition for themselves.
>Now the database fills up the filesystem, and I lose all the data.
>Now you have some way to fix it ?

<sigh> You really have no idea, do you? I'll try to explain it nice
and simply for you:

You use multiple partitions so that if something goes awray and starts
filling log files, or temporary files or something else happens in a
partition, it doesn't clobber the rest of your system. Oh yes, and
also to make OS upgrades more painless. Yes, if the partition
containing your database files filled, you'd likely corrupt the
database. However, it wouldn't affect other services that didn't
require space on a directory mounted in that partition.

Are you keeping up?

Now imagine you had a user who dumped a huge video file into her home
directory, filling your single partition. It would bring the whole
server to a grinding halt, and possibly screw it up so badly that it
would refuse to boot afterward due to numerous zero length files.

How about if you decided you wished to implement quotas on the /home
directory only, or maybe different quotas elsewhere? It's going to be
difficult with one partition.

How about partition optimisation? For example, a partition that was
likely to store only a few very large files (think database or
archives) could be created with larger block sizes to improve
performance. Likewise, a partition with directories holding many small
files could be optimised with smaller blocks to save wasted space
(otherwise, a bunch of 10 byte files would each take 4096 bytes for
example). So this would actually SAVE you disk space and improve
performance. In fact, you might even wish to use a different
filesystem which was more suited to the role that partition would play
(why use a journalled fs on /tmp?)

How about if you decided it would be a good idea to umount the /boot
partition after bootup to keep it safe from some catastrophe? Again,
out of luck.

[...]

>hosts file /etc
>dns files /var
>mail /var/mail
>dhcp config /etc
>users /etc

>there's heaps more.
>/home isnt that useful on its own.

Well, apart from the fact that your home directory is used to store
all of your personal files. Of course, if you don't care about any of
your stuff then I suppose it's not useful to you.

The other directories would not be preserved during an OS change as
there would almost certainly be permission problems, broken symlinks
and old config files not working with new software. You're either a
troll, or rank newbie with Linux if you're unaware of this.

Anyway, I could go on, but I'm guessing you'll ignore all advice and
carry on blundering along until you lose all your data and end up
partitioning anyway. So I won't waste any more time on you. However,
until you learn a little about the subject, it may be better for
everyone if you didn't go spreading bad advice about...

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