[ILUG] Boot partition too small - need grub advice

[John Allen]

Josh Glover wrote:
> 2008/6/17  <paul at clubi.ie>:
>
>   
>> Well, I guess your memory is better than mine. If I didn't mount /boot, I'd
>> eventually forget and run the PMS..
>>     
>
> It should be pretty obvious when you reboot the system and you don't
> have the new kernel though, right? :)
>
> How often do you do kernel updates? I think I've updated mine once in
> the past two years or so, due to some remotely exploitable security
> hole.
>
> Having to think a bit before updating your kernel is not a bad thing, I think.
>
> Finally, shouldn't your PMS complain when it cannot find /boot?
> Gentoo's Portage does, IIRC.
>
>   
Well it will find /boot, whether it is mounted or not. Unmounting /boot 
does not make /boot disappear, it merely makes it a directory in /
>> - If you're administering the machine on a professional basis, stuff
>>  like this leaves surprises for the next admin
>>     
>
> I learned this trick from a professional admin, leading me to suspect
> that others do it as well.
>
>   
Hogwash. Mounting /boot read-only is way more common. That way the 
package manager complains that it cannot write to /boot, rather than it 
magically installing all new kernels into /boot as a directory in the / 
file system.
>> - Module insertion, oops decoding and other crash-diagnosis tools may
>>  need access to object files for running kernel..
>>     
>
> This is a good reason.
>
>   
>> Software is already a mine-field of bugs and strange behaviour, but if this
>> dimly explored field of systems administration works you then have at it.
>>     
>
> Again, I picked this up from somewhere else; I did not have the crazy
> idea myself. So I know that some people are doing this, and I
> understand pretty well how and when the systems I admin need to access
> /boot.
>
>   
>> Just, please, mention stuff like this in any bug reports..
>>     
>
> Fair enough.
>
> If one is running a "magic" distro like RHEL or Ubuntu, I agree that
> changing the default behaviour should not be undertaken lightly. But
> if you maintain a whole network of machines, or are running a
> metadistribution like Gentoo, you should feel free to make
> optimisations that might not work for the 99.99% of the people that
> Ubuntu targets, but confer some benefits to you.
>
>