[Gllug] To partition or not to partition

[Alain Williams]

Reading the review on el reg about the latest Ubuntu:

	http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2010/10/11/ubuntu_10_10_review/

one item of discussion is that Ubuntu does not partition the disk.
I admit to partitioning, I always have done (except for trivial/throw-away/test systems).

I do so because:
* robustness -- keep / on a quiet partition and it should survive nasty crashes
* /boot - similar to /, but also at the start of a disk - prob no longer needed
  Also: I have every partition in LVM, something that you can't do with /boot
  Some also think it unwise to have / in LVM
* /tmp - busy, so most prone to failure, keep separate
* /home - I may want to reinstall from scratch, being separate makes this easier

Looking at the above, there is a lot to do with robustness. Transaction based file
systems are much better than the file systems that I grew up with. Also Ubuntu (ie Debian)
ugrading is very good - so my reinstallation worries may be overblown.

The downside of partitioning is lack of flexibility, ie just how big should /usr be to
accommodate the unknown number of programs that a user may install ?

A radical simplification of my above partitioning could be to just split data and programs,
so 2 partitions:
* /home (symlinks into here for: /tmp & /var)
* / (everything else, ie : also /usr & /boot)


What does the combined wisdom of this list think ? The only discussion constraint is that
we are talking about end-user desktop systems, not some data center server.

FWIW the partitioning on my desktop system (CentOS) is:
	/ /boot /tmp /usr /var /home /bulk
The last 2 will always survive a system reinstall/rebuild.

-- 
Alain Williams
Linux/GNU Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256  http://www.phcomp.co.uk/
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd. Registration Information: http://www.phcomp.co.uk/contact.php
Past chairman of UKUUG: http://www.ukuug.org/
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