On 4/6/2011 11:08 AM, Erik Trimble wrote:
Traditionally, the reason for a separate /var was one of two major items:
(a) /var was writable, and / wasn't - this was typical of diskless or
minimal local-disk configurations. Modern packaging systems are making
this kind of configuration increasingly difficult.
(b) /var held a substantial amount of data, which needed to be handled
separately from / - mail and news servers are a classic example
For typical machines nowdays, with large root disks, there is very
little chance of /var suddenly exploding and filling / (the classic
example of being screwed... <wink>). Outside of the above two cases,
about the only other place I can see that having /var separate is a
good idea is for certain test machines, where you expect frequent
memory dumps (in /var/crash) - if you have a large amount of RAM,
you'll need a lot of disk space, so it might be good to limit /var in
this case by making it a separate dataset.
Some more info ala (b) - The "something filled up the root fs and the
box crashed" problem was fixed for awhile ago. It's still a drag
cleaning up an errant process that is filling up a file system but it
shouldn't crash/panic anymore. However, old habits die hard, especially
at government sites where the rules require a papal bull to be changed,
so I think the option was left to keep folks happy more than any
practical reason.
I'm sure someone has a really good reason to keep /var separated but
those cases are fewer and far between than I saw 10 years ago.
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