ray wrote:

> ... there is no particular advantage to carving it up anyway.

That's not entirely true, but whether or not there is an advantage is
very dependant on the individual installation. consider the following
partitioning scheme, which I use on both home and work systems:

/dev/sda1 on / type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sda2 swap
/dev/sda3 on /usr type ext3 (ro)
/dev/sda5 on /var type ext3 (rw,nosuid)
/dev/sda6 on /tmp type ext3 (rw,nosuid,nodev)
/dev/sda7 on /local type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sda8 on /public type ext3 (rw)
/dev/sda9 on /home type ext3 (rw,nosuid,nodev)

"/public" on some systems (particularly workstations) might be "/opt"
instead; that varies. "/local" is what most Linux distributions call
"/usr/local" (on some systems, I have a symlink from /usr/local to
/local, but again that varies by need). Some systems have more than one
physical disk providing the above partitions.

I could arguably (and perhaps should) have "nodev" on /var and/or
"noexec" on /var and /tmp. On some systems that would cause some
difficulty (users might use /tmp to test software before installing on
their home directories), while on others it would certainly seem
appropriate.

Notice that I'm not showing any sizes. As someone has already said,
that's a tradeoff between size of disk and software installed. I have a
default minimal size that I expect to be able to make each partition,
and I try and leave as much space as possible for /local, /home,
/public, and on some systems (particularly mail servers), /var.

I would argue that there are some very good reasons for keeping locally
installed software, home directories, and directories made public (for
example by a web server, ftp server, etc.) on separate partitions than
the OS directories.

There are also good reasons to not have contents of /usr writable except
when you specifically want to make changes, and the benefits of having
/var and /tmp on separate partitions become immediately obvious as soon
as one or the other fills and either causes logs to be lost, mail to be
dropped (/tmp fills, preventing further writes to /var if not separate),
passwords to not be changeable or other system administration work to
be interrupted (either /tmp or /var fill, but on the same disk partition
as /).

These are, of course, only some examples, and may not be a concern in
every situation, but hopefully illustrate that there can be an
"advantage to carving it up" ...

--
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Sylvain Robitaille syl@alcor.concordia.ca

Systems analyst Concordia University
Instructional & Information Technology Montreal, Quebec, Canada
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