On 23 March 2014 21:56, lee <lee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > There`s nothing weird or exotic about it. I`ve always had /usr on its > own partition until the F17 installer refused that, which it shouldn`t > have. As I have commented elsewhere, I think this is a 1980s style of thinking. Things have changed. Move on. Sorry, but they have; see the links elsewhere. > RAID isn`t exotic, either. Disks do fail, the only question is when, > and I neither want to lose data, nor the hassle. Sure, I use it on all my servers. > Installing on a laptop requires encrypted partitions. They can be > stolen too easily. I have never ever used this and never expect or plan to. I suggest that your blanket statement is too sweeping. http://xkcd.com/538/ >> I never separate out /tmp or /var or /usr/local - I only ever use / >> and /home basically. > > I always use separate partitions. It has lots of advantages. As I said, I use / and /home and advise against combining them. Personally I think that's enough. I am not disputing your reasons, but AIUI, Fedora is trying out a move to flatten and simplify the way-too-complex directory hierarchy. It's happened. The decision is made. Deal with it, move on. > /var can get full, and it`s written to, same goes for /tmp. As I said elsewhere: when the smallest new HD you can buy is half a terabyte (and even SSDs start at half that) this really isn't a big issue any more. > How do you > mount /usr read-only? I don't. Never have in 26y of Unix systems support. For rescue, now, I boot off a LiveDVD or LiveUSB. > Especially on a server, it`s a good idea to mount > everything read-only that you can. When you have several disks, you can > do your partitioning in such a way that you get better performance. An illustrative anecdote, for what it's worth: Back in 1995 I was the testing labs manager for a leading UK computer magazine. In an article, I recommended partitioning 1.2GB disks with a dedicated swap partition at the end. This meant the main partition could be under 1GB and thus use far more space-efficient 8kB blocks. (This is on Win95 or NT 3.5, before FAT32 was invented.) A system manufacturer complained that putting swap on the end of the drive would kill performance. I disagreed. He complained more. So he came in and I set up a test and showed him that, to 2 decimal places in a percentage-based benchmark score, i.e. well below measurement error, there was absolutely *no* difference between the speeds of different areas of the disk. This is in 1995, when LBA addressing was new, 1.2GB was a big disk, and DMA was just starting to appear for EIDE drives. Back then, the difference was not measurable. That was nearly 20y ago. Now, it is not real. It is not there any more. Disks are a thousand times bigger and faster now. This stuff does not matter any more and hasn't since before Linux 2.0 was released. > Especially when you have a server, you may need a (pretty much) granted > capacity on /var or /tmp to make sure it will continue to operate --- > without separate partitions, your users may fill up the disks ... Users shouldn't be able to write stuff to / at all! Only to /home or below, or dedicated data partitions. Where /usr or /var is should not matter to them. > Nowadays you may have SSDs which supposedly last longer when not written > much to but mostly read from, so you might put the partitions that can > be read-only on the SSDs and use magnetic disks for things like /var, > /tmp, /home and swap. Machines come with dozens of gigs of RAM now. I'm not sure there's much argument for swap at all, and personally, I use tmpfs for better performance and a self-cleaning /tmp tree. > Why wouldn`t you use different partitions? I can see it (and have done > it) for when the available disk capacity is extremely limited, but > otherwise it doesn`t make any sense and has nothing but disadvantages. Exactly. One splits stuff up when space is an issue. When it isn't, one doesn't need to. > It`s merely a reasonable standard thing to use separate partitions and a > requirement to use RAID, and encrypted partitions for laptops, not > something in any way unusual. Of course I expect an installer to handle > that as well as using a single, unencrypted partition on a single disk. Actually, I agree, but there must be /some/ limits to the granularity! > And it`s not too difficult. The installer doesn`t need to do the > partitioning, the user does it. The installer only needs to give the > user a good tool to do the partitioning the user wants and let them use > it. Good tools to do partitioning are already available, and the > installer doesn`t need to re-invent the wheel in that. I mostly agree, but bear in mind that the installer must cope with both experts and novices. That's a tough call. I'd say it's /too/ simplified at the moment, though, and I think you might agree...? > Perhaps it even shouldn`t. Why force the user to learn how to use yet > another partitioning tool they even rarely use unless they install > Fedora all the time? Why not give them a choice, like either cfdisk or > parted, then tell the installer what to do with each partition and let > them switch between these until they are done --- or let the installer > do whatever partitioning it wants, which means that all existing data on > the disks will be deleted. Mostly, I would agree, actually. -- Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven@xxxxxxxxx * GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven@xxxxxxxxxxx * Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 * Cell: +44 7939-087884 -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
