also, /var can have a tendency to fill up rapidly, and if it's on the same partition as / there can be some pretty significant problems cropping up.
rick Ethan Benson writes: > On Fri, Dec 01, 2000 at 05:11:13AM -0800, Lazar Fleysher wrote: > > > > Hi Everybody, > > > > This question has been a topic of many discussions but I still do not > > understand the reason why people suggest to have separate partitions of > > /usr > > /usr/local/ > > > > In early days when disks were small, this was the only choise, but now, > > why do not just have a 1 - 2G partition for the system and other > > partitions for other things as needed? > > a seperate partition for /usr/local is useful so you can do a clean > install of the rest of the system without trashing /usr/local, or > mucking with tarring it into /home or such. > > seperating /usr /var /tmp and /home keeps your root filesystem small > and static reducing the chances of it ever becomming corrupted. this > also has security benifits since ordinary users have no write > permission to the root partition any longer (through /tmp /home or > /var) otherwise they could completely fill up the root partition which > tends to cause corruption and other Bad Things. > > speaking from experience having all /var /tmp /home /usr /usr/local > and /var/tmp seperated makes recovering from filesystem corruption > much simpler, if i had gone the MS style `one huge bloated all > encompassing / partition' i would have lost alot of configuration and > user data several times now. (i have a particular machine that must > have a buggy IDE chipset or something) > > another advantage of having /usr and /usr/local on seperate partitions > is you can mount them read-only which saves alot of fsck time if the > machine is shut off improperly or every 20th boot if you shutdown at > night. since /usr is the largest filesystem it takes the longest to > fsck. > > keep / small 64MB is way more then enough, split off everything else: > /var /home /usr and /tmp at a minimum, splitting /usr/local and > /var/tmp is also a good idea. IMO > > -- > Ethan Benson > http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/ -- A picture is worth about 25000 characters. Any more and it takes too long to download.
