Slices

[Kevin Kinsey]

Sasa Stupar wrote:

> You can also do the same as I did. I have just configured one slice 
> named / which
> takes all the space on hdd and now I don't need to worry about space 
> shortage.


OK then, but suppose we have some runaway process logging
errors to syslogd at some absurb rate (n per second).  Suppose
you aren't sitting at the console or some terminal running "df -h"
at the moment. 

Maybe it's that somebody came into the office on Saturday
and the line printer was off-line, but they didn't know
it and sent it a job.  Or, perhaps someone backs up a big
bunch of stuff to some NFS or SMBFS mount point that
happens to not be mounted at the time because some secretary
turned off her box or a janitor ran a mop over some plug somewhere.
Maybe your 'Net connection, on one side or the other, takes a
nose dive, but things appear OK locally, and John in marketing
finishes up the latest sales e-mail and sends it to all 250,000
potential clients.  Perhaps a junior sysadmin decides to use
his homedir as a temporary FTP repository for his mp3 collection,
while he's headed to Mom and Dad's for the holidays, and
forgets that he's got a tree of movies in that dir as well.

There are several possibilities, and sooner or later, somewhere,
someone will get caught be by one of them.

Suppose then that syslogd fills up /var/log/ by writting a
gazillion MB to messages ( ... messages0, messages1 ...
messages n) and, for whatever reason, say, it's not time,
newsyslog hasn't rotated the logfiles yet.

Or Sendmail panics because it can't write to the
spool, 'cause it's full (and then starts writing
error messages to syslogd....)

What I'm saying is:  before you can know it, once
in a while, your / (in the setup you describe) can
end up with no space left.

How will you recover now?  Your hard disk is full;
if you are fortunate, you'll be able to get up
in single-user from the console.  Of course, you
could be a thousand miles away....

That's why my /var is seperate from my / ....

There may be someone who can shoot my scenario
relatively full of holes, but there *was* a reason why
we have a recommended paritioning scheme with
a seperate /, /var, /usr, and so on, and I'm not at all
sure that it's time to abandon it entirely.

My $0.02,

Kevin Kinsey

-- 
I need another lawyer like I need another hole in my head.
		-- Fratianno