[TriLUG] partitioning advice

[Daniel T. Chen]

I tend to separate all the system partitions so there are ones for
/boot, /usr, /var, /tmp, /home, and / . (I've always separated out
/boot, /home, and / for safety reasons as a lot of my hacking
around tends to produce hangs/locks -- thank goodness for journaling
filesystems!) I definitely recommend at least the minimal separation
of /boot, /home, and / .

Historically there were e2fsprogs issues with _not_ having /boot as
a separate ext2 partition if you used certain journaling filesystems
(reiser and ext3 in their infancies), but those have been long
resolved. I remain a tad conservative in that manner, however. The
separation of /home from / allows for easier upgrades. Then there's
the integrity layer of having separate partitions if your system is
compromised and/or hardware failures arise.

---
Dan Chen                 crimsun at email.unc.edu
GPG key:   www.unc.edu/~crimsun/pubkey.gpg.asc

On Mon, 17 Dec 2001, Peter Long wrote:

> To all linux gurus:
> 
> What is the best way to partition your harddrive space so that it is
> easier to manage upgrades? I am installing RH7.2 and I chose its
> autopartion option. It created a 49MB /boot partition, a swap partition
> and then just made everything else the / (root) partition. I was
> expecting it to make a /home partition or a separate /usr partition. I
> did choose a "Custom" install, maybe it behaves differently if you
> choose "Workstation" or "Server".
> 
> What do the experts do and why?
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> --
> Peter Long