[Novalug] Why? And More to the Point, What Do I Do Next?

[Don Groves, Jr.]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 2:33 PM, William Bean <wkbean at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Following the advice of everyone, I have reinstalled Fedora using the
> defaults.
>
> As you had guessed, previously I had relied on my general knowledge of
> Unix to partition the install drive and allocated inadequate space to /var.
>  That experience prompts a new question.  I take as a given that RedHat
> knows infinitely more about Linux and Unix than me, but why would you want
> the whole filesystem (apart from /boot) in a single partition?


Placing /boot on a separate partition is an "OLD" hardware support issue
only and otherwise little if any security is/was gained by doing it.
   { The commonly used "bootloader"s use to have a very small limit as to
how far into a drive  they could reach and load the kernel file itself from.
This is no longer the case except possible on some very very old harder or
extreme special hardware.:-}



>  (My understanding has been that, at minimum, /tmp and /var should be in
> separate partitions to protect the rest of the filesystem from runaway
> processes.)


FIRST {ask yourself}:
  What are you going to use this system/setup for?
  Is it going to be used by a bunch of untrusted users running totally
untrusted code?
  Then your concerns may even be somewhat meaningful, otherwise.

 Or is this a Desktop/Laptop and a getting to know the system/setup type
install?

  If this is a "first time (alfia/beta/get to know) install of a given
distribution" (even for a advance user like myself) it is highly recommended
that they accept the defaults as much as possible and get to know the system
and at first try and understand why the developers made the choices they
made before trying to take control and going your own route.

Since most likely  the system will have to be reinstalled anyway (possible
even more then once)  before it will be ready for production use, unless you
are very lucky.

  {-:Every Micros??t based set up I've ever dealt with in the past has had
to be reinstalled multi times from the start before it was useful for more
then a very short while. The longest was six(6) months on a laptop witch had
very light usage and it got WIPED OUT by a warenty  level repair tech:-}


-- 
-- 
--
Don E. Groves, Jr
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://calypso.tux.org/pipermail/novalug/attachments/20080412/44f37538/attachment.html