On Mon, Nov 10, 2003 at 01:33:12PM -0500, 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.

Other people will give you some good reasons; here I'll indicate how the
tread started in the first place.

It's certainly NOT good practice, particularly NOT for a production system,
but for a hobbyist using dumpster-grade hardware, partitioning off bad areas
of a disk can make it possible to continue using a faulty disk.  My main
web server runs, and has been running for almost 4 years, on a disk that
has two totally destroyed sections, one at 56% (only a few bad sectors) and
another at 75%-85% of the data space.  The latter of these is cordoned off
into a partition that is NEVER used, leaving me with 1GB+ of scsi-2 disk
space, great for an old Sun Classic.

Actually, my experimenting with partitioning /usr/pkgsrc on as small a slice
as possible was with this very strategy in mind.  On small disks (<1GB) I
tend to use /usr/pkgsrc as a reference resource only.  Usually it gets used
for a couple of months, and then just sits there for the life of the system.

h.