Re: [tlug] how filesystem works?

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Actually, IMO it's better to think in terms of "mv == rename" first,
> with a special extension for the case where renaming is not possible
> (different file systems).  This clear up a lot of confusion about mv
> for many newbies.  It's a shame there's not a similar intuition for rm.

Just calling it "unlink," which is the name of the system call it uses,
might help.

On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Al Hoang wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 30, 2007 at 10:20:18AM +0200, Godwin Stewart wrote:
> > Do people still run Linux systems with just a huge root partition?
>
>    Yes, because some of us have other things to do besides play
> partition-oops-i-screwed-up-the-sizes-again games unless there's
> really a good reason....

There are some pretty good reasons out there. One is backup: dump (you
linux guys have that, right?) is a lot better than tar, but dumps full
partitions, and it's nice to dump just the data you want to keep, rather
than all the OS stuff that's already obsolete anyway. The second is
security: you can turn off devices and suid bits on filesystems where you
don't need them.

I've been using more or less the following system (with the appropriate
increases in size over time--obviously I wasn't going to fit a 64 MB
root partition on a 9 MB drive) since the early '90s.

    root	64-128 MB
    tmp		128-1024 MB	mfs
    /usr	2-4 GB
    /var	0.5-2 GB	nosuid
    /home	2-8 GB		nosuid,nodev
    /u		remainder	nosuid,nodev

The reason I don't use nodev on /var is because /var/chroot has devices
for various chrooted programs, such as named and ntpd.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974