At 1:33 PM -0500 11/10/03, Scott Zahn wrote:
>On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Michael G. Schabert wrote:
>
>>  3) Old-school unix admins who still believe in the tiny /, separate
>>  /usr, /home, /tmp, and /EverythingElse
>
>This part of your reply caught my eye.  I still hear a lot that the many
>partitions scheme you were describing is the best way, but I never really
>knew why. When I first installed netbsd (at version 1.6), the default
>partitioning was for the "old school" style. Could someone on this list
>please enlighten me why this many partitions thing was so good?  Was it
>only so none of those directories could take up all the space on the
>disk or were there other reasons too?

Yeah, in unix, it is *really* bad to completely fill up /. Because of 
this, /home and /tmp were offloaded to separate partitions, so that 
even if a user hogged space (disregarding quotas), / would still have 
room. Also, "way back when", disks were expensive and were smaller, 
so to get larger systems (remember this stuff was designed to run 
entire universities), you'd need to use multiple disks, and it was 
simpler to assign a drive to a mountpoint than to concatenate drives 
into larger logical volumes. Of course now you can spend $100 and get 
an 80GB drive pretty much anywhere :).

HTH
Mike
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