[Nottingham] any issues symlinking /tmp -> /var/tmp ?

[Michael]

Graeme Fowler wrote:
> "religious" arguments aside. no, not really. Especially if you mount 
> /var with the "noexec" option - a good idea against random executables, 
> barring someone running:
> 
> /lib/ld-<ver>.so <binary>
> 
> For those who haven't seen that before, it's a deadly sneaky way of 
> running executables on partitions with the noexec flag set :)

Good idea!

> Commercially, a number of distributions have shipped with /tmp as a 
> symlink to somewhere else. In my experience the obvious one is the now 
> defunct CobaltOS, shipped with the RaQ, Qube and other appliances; 
> Cobalt symlinked /tmp and /var/tmp to /home/tmp for reasons of space 
> (not security).

Yes, I've symlinked /tmp to ramdisk on a few embedded projects

> In my experience it's a good way to work around a repeating problem if 
> you have duff web scripts filling up /tmp with (say) PHP uploads. But if 
> you have that problem you can always recompile PHP (or whatever else) to 
> use a different temp path in the first place :)
> 
> What particular reasons do you have for / filling up so quickly? Again, 
> in my experience this indicates poor system design somewhere (no offence 
> intended).

Yup, poor system design! When I manually partitioned some time back I 
gave the /boot, /var, and /usr partitions too much space and didn't give 
/home in its own partition so / fills when users (i.e. me!) do something 
requiring a large amount of space. It's something I have meant to fix 
for a while - probably moving /home to /usr/home would do it but I don't 
want to interrupt the process that urgently requires the disk space so 
I'm looking for quick temporary patch up jobs to make some space. I 
guess I'll have to kill a bunch of processes to free up /tmp anyway!

Regards,
Michael Erskine