Re: [tlug] how filesystem works?

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Mon, 02 Apr 2007 13:51:01 +0900
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> wrote:

> Stuart Luppescu writes:
> 
>  > This is something I never understood. Someone told me to put /var in its 
>  > own partition because if it fills us (with log files, or whatever) it 
>  > will crowd out other stuff and make the computer unusable.

Yes, but only a few things will not work anymore. The majority
of the system is still healthy. While a filled root partition
is something very hard to recover from.

> If you do quarantine /var, you can boot to single-user (or simply stop
> daemons etc that use /var, but that's tricky), find space on another
> partition, mv (or "gzip >") the logs (mail spool, etc) there, and
> restart the system.  Also, any write operation on another partition
> will succeed, you won't lose data.

That's the reason why i generally seperate /var/log from the rest of /var.
If my log space fills up, i still want that the rest works normaly.

At least on servers. On desktop machines i converted to the 
one partition fits all fraction. It's a lot easier to estimate
the correct size of one partition (= the whole disk) than 3-5 of
them. And if a desktop fails to work, then it isn't the end of the
world, as there is always a knoppix around and reboot is possible.
Which isn't the case for most servers.

			Attila Kinali

-- 
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