Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:35:59 +0100 From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To: "Mike Meyer" <mwm-dated-1012342995.0fa084@mired.org>, Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> Cc: chip <chip@wiegand.org>, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Bad disk partitioning policies (was: "Re: FreeBSD Intaller (was "Re: ... RedHat ...")") Message-ID: <p0510123fb876493753e0@[10.0.1.3]> In-Reply-To: <15440.35155.637495.417404@guru.mired.org> References: <20020123114658.A514@lpt.ens.fr> <20020123124025.A60889@HAL9000.wox.org> <3C4F5BEE.294FDCF5@mindspring.com> <20020123223104.SM01952@there> <p0510122eb875d9456cf4@[10.0.1.3]> <15440.35155.637495.417404@guru.mired.org>
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At 4:23 PM -0600 2002/01/24, Mike Meyer wrote: > So instead of causing a serious DoS by running /usr out of space, you > cause a serious DoS by running /var out of space. That will shut down > all the daemons that log to /var/log; anything trying to update things > in /var/db, which is most of the databases; mail and the printers will > quit working; and so on. That's assuming that you don't have a separate /var/tmp and/or a separate /var/log, which I always do. Moreover, IMO a full /var is less dangerous than a full everything-but-the-root-filesystem (including /var, /usr, and everything else). In addition, with separate filesystems available for /var (and various subdirectories under it), you can now mount them nosuid and make them much, much less dangerous, and you should be able to mount /usr read-only (assuming a separate /usr/local), which will make it more difficult for people/skript k1dd13s/programs to take a user-level security compromise and turn it into a root-level security compromise. > Unless you've got user home directories on /usr, it's relatively > static. Leaving /var on it just means you get that much more space to > run out of before things break. When programs run amok, they run amok fast enough that *no* amount of disk space is likely to give you enough additional time to notice what's going on and to fix it. I've blown disk space partitions that were in the tens of GB as a result of programs running amok, and if I hadn't segregated them onto separate filesystems, the entire machine would have been hosed. > The same thing applies to /. So the > end result of leaving /, /usr and /var on one file system - so long as > users home directories aren't on it - is that /var has lots of free > space. Why not just put everything on a single filesystem and be done with it? I mean, if you're going to be silly, we might as well be really silly. No, there are very good reasons why we create separate partitions for separate parts of the directory tree, and now that we have individual disk drives that easily measure 100GB or more, there should be no problem with having too much space in partition A and not enough in partition B. -- Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be> H4sICIFgXzsCA2RtYS1zaWcAPVHLbsMwDDvXX0H0kkvbfxiwVw8FCmzAzqqj1F4dy7CdBfn7 Kc6wmyGRFEnvvxiWQoCvqI7RSWTcfGXQNqCUAnfIU+AT8OZ/GCNjRVlH0bKpguJkxiITZqes MxwpSucyDJzXxQEUe/ihgXqJXUXwD9ajB6NHonLmNrUSK9nacHQnH097szO74xFXqtlbT3il wMsBz5cnfCR5cEmci0Rj9u/jqBbPeES1I4PeFBXPUIT1XDSOuutFXylzrQvGyboWstCoQZyP dxX4dLx0eauFe1x9puhoi0Ao1omEJo+BZ6XLVNaVpWiKekxN0VK2VMpmAy+Bk7ZV4SO+p1L/ uErNRS/qH2iFU+iNOtbcmVt9N16lfF7tLv9FXNj8AiyNcOi1AQAA To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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