[plug] LILO Problems

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Thu, 11 Feb 1999, Rick wrote:
> Perhaps someone can edify us newbies. What, if any, is the advantage in
> having a number of partitions for Linux?
For a single-user, desktop machine, very little. You do want the extra
speed of a dedicated swap partition, though, so that makes two.
For a server, there are good reasons to have many more:
* Several swap partitions on seperate disks are faster than 1 such.
* Since the /tmp directory can be written to by users, it can be a good
  idea to put it in its own partition in case it fills up.
* A small /boot partition can be put near the beginning of a large drive,
  if you need to boot from within the first 1000 cylinders. (some BIOS's
  require this) This also keeps the kernel on a filesystem you don't have
  to have mounted, and thus should never corrupt.
* The /var directory is called "variable" because it is very frequently
  altered - constant appending to logfiles, creation and deletion of
  files, and other such matters, and as such is likely to suffer greater
  fragmentation than other areas. It's a good idea to keep this on from
  large files that need to be read in bulk - the ones which suffer in
  fragmented circumstances.
* A /home mount can be given extra restrictions (nosuid,noexec, for
  example), given that it will be written to by untrusted users.
  Likewise /tmp.
* On a static system, the binary directories can be read-only for
  security and safety.
* On a network, one might wish to have each machine identical, except for
  the contents of /usr/local. A seperate /usr/local partition can keep a
  machine's individual personality stored in one place for easy
  maintenance. Also, it becomes possible for much of the rest of the
  filesystem to be mounted read-only by each node from a shared NFS mount.

There are probably other reasons, strategies, tips, etc. that others have
for partitioning drives, but this is at least enough to see that there can
indeed be great benefits from careful partition planning.
Of course, for most peoples' purposes, just the two partitions, / and swap
are perfectly adequate, and a lot easier.

-Greg Mildenhall(Speeling his name right this time.)