From: Kenn Humborg (kenn at domain linux.ie)
Date: Sun 15 Oct 2000 - 23:26:13 IST
On Sun, Oct 15, 2000 at 10:48:47PM +0100, Thomas Ribbrock wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 15, 2000 at 06:56:40PM +0100, Diarmaid O'Loughlin wrote:
> > Is one big / partition with a small /boot partition such a bad thing?
>
> Not as such - having separate /home and maybe /usr/local on a desktop
> machine just comes in dead handy during an upgrade or suchlike. That's why I
> usually separate them out. But it's probably more a matter of taste as long
> as you don't run a heavy-duty server or something like that.
Tip of the day #1:
Make /home a symlink to /usr/local/home. That way you don't have to
balance the needs of /home and /usr/local. Just put them both in
one big partition.
In fact, I usually just have a small / and a large /usr, with /var linked
to /usr/var and /home to /usr/local/users.
It means that / is small and doesn't change very often, so a power failure
or crash is extremely unlikely to cause enough damage to / that e2fsck
can't fix it without intervention.
However, the larger and more active a filesystem is, the more likely that
boot-time fsck will say "Cannot fix automatically - dropping to a shell".
In a situation like that you really want to be able to trust /bin, /sbin
and /lib, so you want to be sure that they are 100% OK.
Tip of the day #2:
Here's the right way to move /home to /usr/local/users (or /var to
/usr/var):
First drop to single-user mode:
# init 1
Then copy the trees:
# (cd / && tar cf - var ) | (cd /usr && tar xvf - )
# (cd / && tar cf - home ) | (cd /usr/local && tar xvf - )
Then move the originals out of the way and make the symlinks:
# cd /
# mv var var.old
# mv home home.old
# ln -s usr/var var
# ln -s usr/local/home home
Note the lack of leading / on these symlinks. If you do this:
# ln -s /usr/var var
then the Red Hat installer might get confused during an upgrade
as it mounts your paritions under /tmp/sysimage (or something)
during the upgrade. If you use relative symlinks the the installer
will find the correct /tmp/sysimage/usr/var and
/tmp/sysimage/usr/local/home, otherwise it will end up pointing to
/usr/var and /usr/local/home which definitely won't exist.
Later,
Kenn
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