[TriLUG] disk partitioning

[Jon Carnes]

Red Hat went the way of simplicity.  An experienced admin will partition
the disk themselves, and inexperienced user will simply not want to deal
with having separate volumes (or they will partition it themselves).

Kudo's to RedHat for making it easier on Newbies.

One big partition will not be slower, but it is less "secure".  As an
example, your "/tmp" directory is on the big "/" and that directory is
wide-open to being written to.  If someone with external access to your
box decides to hose you, they can simply write a ton of small file to
your "/tmp" directory.  This will eat up all the space on your drive as
well as all the inodes.

On a workstation that may not be a big deal to you - especially if you
don't run any daemon's like ftp or apache.  I recommend though that you
do have a separate /home directory (or a /backup directory).  At some
point in the lifespan of that hard drive you will want to upgrade the
distribution.  When that happens, you will find it easier to
install/backup if everything you want to preserve is in a separate
volume.

Good Luck - Jon Carnes

On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 10:34, Morris Walton wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> I just installed RH8, using a new 120G hd.  I accepted the default
> partitioning scheme, which basically just uses /boot, /, and swap.  "/"
> has the bulk of the space.  I was wondering if there is a shift in
> philosophy in using less partitions than before as I remember RH
> recommending more partitions in older versions.  Will the one big
> partition be slower?
>  
> Thanks,
>  
> Morris