Linux Partitions

[Nothinman]

But what does keeping / small and the nodev option actually get you?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
But what does keeping / small and the nodev option actually get you?

No devices in the /usr partition, and it keeps things separated nicely.

 

[Corey0808]

Lol your discussion (n0cmonkey & Nothinman) is just getting me confused. Can you both summarize what you think I should do and I could make the decision from there please? Thanks I really appreciate it

 

[Nothinman]

I know what nodev does, but what does that actually get you? You need to be root to create device nodes and if you're root, it's simple to run 'mount -o remount,dev /usr'.

And they're not seperated, sure from the kernel view they're logically seperate filesystems. But from the user's standpoint, it's one big tree and mounting /usr from a seperate device has no advantages.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Corey0808
Lol your discussion (n0cmonkey & Nothinman) is just getting me confused. Can you both summarize what you think I should do and I could make the decision from there please? Thanks I really appreciate it

Use a separate /home directory. Bare minimum for a machine should probalby be:
/
/home
swap

/boot if you swing that way.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I know what nodev does, but what does that actually get you? You need to be root to create device nodes and if you're root, it's simple to run 'mount -o remount,dev /usr'.

And they're not seperated, sure from the kernel view they're logically seperate filesystems. But from the user's standpoint, it's one big tree and mounting /usr from a seperate device has no advantages.

Imagine a worm going through that deposits a suid binary that binds a shell to a port. Isnt' that enough reason to use nosuid? nodev? Welll that's trickier.

 

[Nothinman]

Imagine a worm going through that deposits a suid binary that binds a shell to a port. Isnt' that enough reason to use nosuid? nodev? Welll that's trickier.

nosuid, maybe. But if you put nosuid on /usr you'll break things like at, passwd, smbmount, sudo etc that sit in /usr/bin.

 

[Corey0808]

What's a SUID?



So I was thinking about this

/
/home
/usr
swap
possibly /boot

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Imagine a worm going through that deposits a suid binary that binds a shell to a port. Isnt' that enough reason to use nosuid? nodev? Welll that's trickier.

nosuid, maybe. But if you put nosuid on /usr you'll break things like at, passwd, smbmount, sudo etc that sit in /usr/bin.

Not wirth systrace.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Corey0808
What's a SUID?

Something like "switch User ID." It runs a binary with the permissions of the owner instead of just the person running it.

So I was thinking about this

/
/home
/usr
swap
possibly /boot

They're right, /usr isn't necessary when you're first starting out. You'll probably be formatting a couple of times anyhow. /, /home, swap, and maybe /boot.

 

[Nothinman]

Not wirth systrace.

Which noone uses.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Not wirth systrace.

Which noone uses.

NetBSD and OpenBSD make use of it. I'd be surprised if google didn't use it.

 

[Nothinman]

NetBSD and OpenBSD make use of it. I'd be surprised if google didn't use it.

Well you said noone used EAs and that wasn't true either.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

NetBSD and OpenBSD make use of it. I'd be surprised if google didn't use it.

Well you said noone used EAs and that wasn't true either.

There you go.

I read over some of the marketting stuff RH put out about SELinux in fedora/RHEL. Sounds neat. It's about time someone did that stuff by default.

 

[Nothinman]

I'm also hoping that RH buying and OSSing Netscape's LDAP server will finally get us some decent LDAP management tools.

 

[TGS]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
/boot if you swing that way.

Yeah baby. You wouldn't want a bunch of L 7 weenies not using /boot.
*NEWB ALERT*

Matter of fact why I like using /boot for another purpose. Is to make that partition and not even mount it with the fstab. Then you have to manually mount it to do any editing. Or is just a pipe dream for kids like me, so I can sleep at night?

*Huddles in corner with pacifier again*

 

[pennylane]

I have a similar related question...
I'm just getting started with linux and want to know what kind of partitions I should have as well. I want to dual boot with windows xp. I want to mainly use linux for non-gaming stuff, but I wouldn't mind the flexibility of being able to easily access and use documents from windows. I guess what I mean is I'd rather store most documents in some neutral location rather than in /home or in C:\Docs and Settings... though perhaps storing them in /home wouldn't be a bad idea.

I'm wondering how much space I should devote to linux. Right now I plan on using a 120 gig hard drive. I have Windows taking up one 30 gig partition. The other 80+ gigs are free. (I have another hard drive full of music and other media.)

After reading through this thread, I think I'll go with a somewhat simple /, /home, /boot, and swap configuration. /boot and swap shouldn't take up much space, so I'm wondering how I should partition the other 80 gigs. I have to split the 80 gigs between /, /home, and perhaps another partition for documents and various files. I have no idea how much I should devote to / and /home since I've never run linux before.

Any thoughts? I'm hoping I'm at least knowing what I'm talking about, since I only vaguely understand all this stuff - I'm reading up on linux as we speak though. Thanks

 

[TGS]

If you want to be able to swap data back and forth, just make a seperate FAT partition.

Unless the distribution is really bloated or you install Everything-and-the-Kitchen-Sink? you shouldn't need more than 10GBs total, on / at least.

For 90ish GBs, I would do something like this

100MB /boot (ext2 or ext3)
19.9 GB / (either ext2 ext3 or reiserfs)
69 GB /home (either ext2 ext3 or reiserfs)
1 GB swap (swap of course)

ext2 ext3 FS types should be enabled by default, you may have to modify a kernel to get reiserfs to work. If you want a fuss free install just go all ext3 and swap. the performance may not be as good as ext3 vs reiser on larger file structures.

Now have you given any though to which bootloader you will use to start the system?

If you are dual booting, I find the linux bootloaders much more straightforward to modify.

I tend to go more on /home, because I download/unarchive/whatever in my /home/user directory. That tends to eat up space fairly fast if you don't keep on eye on it, or delete things.

 

[pennylane]

I will probably use more of home as well. I think something along those lines should work pretty well for me.

I haven't thought of a bootloader yet but I'll try going for the linux ones then. Thanks.