LVM considerations...

[Stewart Stremler]

begin  quoting John H. Robinson, IV as of Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 09:17:57AM -0800:
[snip]
> There were a few reasons. One of which being LILO not reading past a
> certain point of a hard drive, so you have a small / or /boot near the
> beginning. No longer an issue, for either LILO or GRUB

No 2TB limit?

> Another being keeping / small so if a drive error occurs, / has less of
> a chance of getting nailed. Still applicable. Good backups mitigate
> this.

A related reason is that a small / will take less time to fsck.  That
can save a lot of aggravation.

> The third being an errant process that fills up (say) /var won't touch /
> (of / fills up, things can get Really Interesting. Of course, when /var
> fills up, things also get Really Interesting so your mileage may vary).

Different UNIXy operating systems handle this differently.  Solaris does
a pretty decent job of handling this sort of abuse. (I've done this a
time or two -- along with exhausting swap.)

> Similarly, a user filling up $HOME won't touch / or /var. A laptop is
> usually not a multi-user system, so you don't need those protections.
> Quotas also prevent Evil People from filling up partitions.

Only if those Evil People are using the system -- which gets us into the
multi-user space -- if they're just hammering at your door, they can
quite easily fill up /var/log...

> I am certain interested people can come up with more reasons why a good
> partitioning scheme is A Good Thing and I likely will not argue. My only
> point is that a laptop does not have the same concerns.

Primary concerns for a laptop, I should think, would be:

  a) survives power-offs/imprudent shutoffs
  b) boots very quickly
  c) easy to quickly back up important data

> A desktop or a server . . . totally different story.
 
I don't expect a server to boot quickly. :)

> > Anyway symlinks it is until the next desktop...
> 
> You can also use bind mounts. This is what I have done in the past. I
> find it to be a *little* bit cleaner than symlinks. That is just my
> opinion. though

I find bind mounts not quite flexible enough, and not quite as clean
as symlinks. Likewise, my opinion. :)

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