more than 7 partitions on a SCSI-drive

[illoai at gmail.com]

On 21/01/07, Garrett Cooper <youshi10 at u.washington.edu> wrote:
>
> Jeff Mohler wrote:
<something top-posted>
> > On 1/21/07, Christian Baer <christian.baer at uni-dortmund.de> wrote:

> >> problem is that I can't allocate another partition
>
>         One good reason I can think of is to partition (not the tech definition
> but the traditional definition, "to divide") filesystems such that if
> one person fills up "/", it won't cause a program that needs to write to
> "/var" or "/tmp" problems, which in the case of "/var" can bring down
> entire systems and infrastructures (happened before where I was working
> as IT when a CUPS server ran out of space on /var).

Run-away programs certainly are a reason.

Also (and more so with 500G+ drives) only root
must fsck before the system is brought up, so
you can get the system to a (somewhat) useable
state more quickly than if you had to fsck the
whole lot at one go.

On systems that have myriads of arbitrarily
sized files which grow and shrink (larger MUDs
are subject to this, I know, probably many other
games with local user files as well) you can defrag
with a simple tar jcf, rm -r, tar jxf.

Enforcement of certain security rules (noexec,
nosuid) is simpler and easier when the directories
are seperated onto their own filesystems.

NFS is more straightforward as well.

Hard drives rarely fail catastrophically, and moving
the affected information may be eased (or at
least I have found it so) by careful partitioning.

-- 
--