[Gllug] starting X

[tet at accucard.com]

>Partitioning, to me, is a poor solution for every problem which it's
>used to solve. Originally, partitioning was more to do with making
>disk spaces that the BIOS and/or OS could handle in terms of size
>when big disks came along - it's a bodge. Partitioning different
>areas to allow different rights makes a little sense

Not just rights, but also disk usage. If you have /var/log on a
separate filesystem, then when it fills up, your machine can carry
on running, because there's space in the root filesystem to do
whatever routine housekeeping is necessary. If everything was in
a single filesystem, then you'd have a problem.

Oddly enough, I was bitten by this when I got in today. Our outgoing
mail relay was bouncing serveral messages because they were too big
(why people insist on sending 40MB Word docs via email is beyond me,
but that's another issue). That filled up our /var filesystem, which
in turn meant the DHCP server was unable to write its leases file, and
so stopped issuing addresses. In true MS style, that in turn convinced
the Win2K clients on the network to randomly assign themselves an
address in the 169.254.0.0 network (which is assigned to IANA). Sigh.
As a result, I'm considering mvoing /var/spool/mqueue onto a separate
filesystem to prevent this happening again.

I agree, though, that the ability to mark a directory heirarchy as
"mounted read only" with sub-filesytem granularity would be a nice
feature, but since we don't have it yet, partitioning works.

Tet

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