From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Feb 7 16:57:46 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 9976437B401 for ; Wed, 7 Feb 2001 16:57:27 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 34458 invoked by uid 100); 8 Feb 2001 00:57:26 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14977.61174.493877.502920@guru.mired.org> Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 18:57:26 -0600 (CST) To: Bill Moran Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Some conceptional questions about partition size In-Reply-To: <51153511@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Bill Moran types: > > As we move now toward a RAID, several aspects shown above become irrelevant/obsolet. > > So, my question for that is: is it a good task to "melt together" all > > system's directories together into a big partition, say, mounted as / ? > The big disadvantage to this is that if something being written to /var > corrupts the filesystem, you could have an unbootable system. Whereas if > / and /var are seperate, a corrupt /var filesystem will still allow > boot, and you can fairly easily rebuild /var and get up and running > again. While file system corruption used to be a serious problem, it's pretty much neglible these days. There are two reasons for this. One is that the hardware and software are both more reliable and robust than they used to be. The other is that the cost of a single machine being down is typically much lower than it used to be. Of course, the latter isn't always true, but by the time a system is so critical that having it down a bit longer to dig out the fixit cdrom is a major problem, it's also so critical that RAID and hot spares become reasonable alternatives for failure recovery. These days, the only good reasons to split a file system are administrative, like these two of yours: > Another reason I split filesystems is to achieve a simplified quota > mechanism. > I usually split by purpose. I also split file systems based on the backup strategy I'm using for them. It's different for things I can recreate from sources or the net and things I've created or modified locally. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message