Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 18:06:14 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: tom@sdf.com (Tom) Cc: Don.Lewis@tsc.tdk.com, tlambert@primenet.com, craig@ProGroup.COM, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Partitioning suggestions? Message-ID: <199711191806.LAA12806@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.95q.971118225922.25964A-100000@misery.sdf.com> from "Tom" at Nov 18, 97 11:02:25 pm
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> > } On Tue, 18 Nov 1997, Terry Lambert wrote: > > } > > } > This is really bogus reasoning. The / partition will never fill up > > } > because only root can fill it up, and there is a 10% reserve for root > > } > to use. You can fit a lot of password file entries into 3M of a 30M FS. > > } > > } syslog runs as root, and it is big source of filled filesystems. > > > > The log files are stored in /var/log. I always make /var a separate > > partition. > > Yes, that is whole point. Separate comparments for everything is good. > Terry seems to believe otherwise. Wrong. I gave ten good reasons why you would want things seperate, whereas the original poster gave one bad one. You can't argue "filling the disk up". It's a bogus argument: I) Filling the disk up should not be catastrophic, even if it does occur. II) Only root processes can override the reserve. This means pilot error in the most general sense. Pilot error can also write over the front of a raw disk; how does the software prevent one kind of pilot error, but not the other? It can't. III) If you have a root process which is a daemon, good sense dictates that the process will have its own controls to prevent overriding the reserve. The syslog argument remains bogus, since you should use newsyslog instead, and avoid the issue. For each example of badly behaved software you can come up with, I will either point to a well behaved piece of software, or I will simply say "then fix it". The FreeBSD penchant for destroying passwd files when the disk is full is an *error* in FreeBSD, and should be corrected. Then I can point at (I) above, and state "so what? So the disk is full...". > > The only file in my root partition that has been modified in the last > > week is /etc/dumpdates. > > And that might be a debatable location for that file. It is nice have / > as static as possible. Some other things: /etc/aliases, > /etc/master.passwd I definitely agree with this. / should be read-only. So should /usr, if you want to get down to it. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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