On Friday 22 June 2001 17:33, Kevin J. Menard, Jr. wrote: > RC> What exactly will that save you from? If the root FS gets messed > up then RC> having a separate /boot won't gain you much... > > I was thinking the other way around actually. If /boot were to get > messed up, it wouldn't affect /.
As /boot almost never gets written to I think it's the least likely partition to get seriously stuffed. > Well, I'll be using Cyrus IMAPd. Doesn't use Maildir, but does create > separate folders per user. Thus, the spool is really not going to hold > data much. However long it takes to rip data off incoming (using > postfix) and send it out, or however long to hand it off to lmtpd and > let cyrus deliver it. OK. So you want Cyrus storage on the file system used for user data. > RC> If you have two partitions on the same physical media (in this case > a RC> RAID-10) then expect to lose performance. If you make it all one > large RC> partition then the file system drivers can optimise things > more. > > Oh. Guess I didn't quite understand how disk I/O functioned. I > figured something like /var, which will have a lot of synchronous > writes, would get better performance outside of / or /home. IFF you have separate physical hardware for the different file systems that will be true. However you only have one physical device (the RAID device) so this will not be a benefit. > RC> I recommend having a separate /home to limit the things that can go > RC> wrong. I recommend leaving /var on the root file system unless you > need RC> a lot of space in /var. > > Just from a performance point of view or for other reasons? Having /home and /tmp on separate devices to / gives some security benefits by limiting the ability to produce hard links. Hard linking /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow to a name under /tmp or the user's home directory has been step 1 of a number of security attacks... Having /tmp and /home on separate devices to the root FS limits the ability of hostile users to perform such attacks. > RC> Also consider a separate file system for > RC> /var/tmp and make /tmp a sym-linke to /var/tmp/tmp . > > Once again . . . just for stability? security? Security as described above and stability regarding issues of lack of space and/or Inodes. > >> drives have come a long way, and with a RAID 10, would I be safe in > >> doing this? Or should I just have a coulple gig / and the rest for > >> /home? > > RC> RAID has no relevance to the issue of partitioning in this sense. > > Well, my point here was, with the RAID 10, I already have a pretty good > amount of reliability, as if one drive fails, the system can still > function. And with disks that are pretty reliable to begin with, I > wasn't sure if the combination of all these would merit just one large > / fs. How will one partition or two partitions affect reliability? Disk failures tend to be boolean things, if a disk starts dieing then all data seems to rapidly disappear from it. So in you don't have RAID then having separate partitions is unlikely to save you. -- http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/projects.html Projects I am working on http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page
