[ On Saturday, June 30, 2001 at 13:04:50 (+0200), Thomas Michael Wanka wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Why root and usr in separate partitions?
>
> I allways thought that the partioning shemes main 
> reason was to keep parts of the disk that have 
> frequent write access (like logs) und user write 
> access (whereever the users of the system keep 
> their apps)in seperate partitions to reduce the 
> risk of demaging partitions needed by the system 
> in case of problems like power failures and such. 

That's part of the recovery issue, but it's not the original reason.

There is no real reason to keep / and /usr separate.  /var, yes, /home
too, and maybe /usr/local (/local, /opt, whatever), /usr/pkg, /usr/src,
etc., but not / and /usr.  They should both be relatively static.  Sure
you can't make / read-only, but I still haven't seen a non-diskless
system where that's true anyway.

These days it's still handy to have a separate / and /usr for diskless
machines, but the original reason was simply because everything wouldn't
fit on one disk!  ;-)

Oh, and BTW, /var alone as a separate partition isn't sufficient if
you've got a busy system and not much space.  You'll probably want /var,
/var/log, /var/mail, and maybe /var/spool, /var/spool/uucp,
/var/spool/news and so on, depending on what you do with the system.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>     <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>;   Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>