On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 7:04 PM, Canek Peláez Valdés <can...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 6:54 PM, Neil Bothwick <n...@digimed.co.uk> wrote: >> On Wed, 7 Sep 2011 13:52:22 -0400, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote: >> >>> After reading that, and other similar threads, I still don't >>> understand the benefits of a separated /usr. >> >> Putting it on a logical volume is one advantage, allowing /usr to be >> resized should the need arise. > > Why not allow / to be resized entirely? You probably will take the > machine off-line anyway.
A few months ago, I had to recover a live Debian machine which had massive filesystem corruption in /usr; the hard drive it was on had begun going bad, and it was taking out /usr slowly. I wound up being able to recover by doing a full reinstall of all packages on the live system after mounting /usr into a freshly-mkfs'd new lvm volume. If I'd taken the system offline, it would have been much more difficult. (As it was, I was shocked it worked) > >>> Mounting it read-only >>> seems the only sensible one, and then I think is better to go all the >>> way and mount / read-only. >> >> Putting /etc on a read-only filesystem seems a really bad idea. > > mount -o remount,rw / > emerge --sync && emerge -uDNv world > dispatch-conf > mount -o remount,ro / > > Or, if you only want to modify some configuration file (which in a > sane environment doesn't happen that often): > > mount -o remount,rw / > adduser fulano ... > mount -o remount,ro / So, no hobbyists? Operating a 'sane' environment at home isn't how I've taught myself Linux. In a production environment, sure; having everything possible be read-only is nice, from a security standpoint. > > Again, I don't see the reason for a separated /usr. But *again*, if > that's what you want, you will be able to do it. You will just need an > initramfs. Yeah, great. Used to be, I could configure needed components to be built-ins in the kernel. -- :wq
