Partitioning

[Valeri Galtsev]

> On Feb 12, 2021, at 9:56 PM, Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 12 Feb 2021 19:19:33 +0000, Graham Perrin wrote:
>> On 11/02/2021 20:32, david russell wrote:
>> 
>>> In my opinion an all in 1 partition is a disaster waiting to happen.
>> 
>> In what way?
> 
> If you have things like /tmp, /var/log, /home and so rooted in
> the same partition, a "runaway process" could fill your whole
> disk just writing to /tmp, and you wouldn't know, because a log
> file can no longer be written. Also users might be affected and
> cannot save their work files as /home runs out of space (simply
> because / is full).

True, and very clearly stated.

> Especially on systems providing server functionalities, this kind
> of problem is not desired.
> 

There is additional advantage: some of filesystems can be mounted read only or with “noexec” option; which (especially on the server) will stop bad guys who stole user password from executing exploit. Of course, your server must be updated, but extra barrier always helps. After all we just compete with bad guys, so buying extra time helps. That one I learned long ago. I even watched unsuccessful attempts in real lite on one of my servers ;-). Not mentioning nodev which more knowledgeable person told me is not necessary on FreeBSD. But I still I mentioned it ;-) as I’m Linux guy too; though these days I do more FreeDSD-isms on Linux than Linuxisms on FreeBSD.

> Another useful thing about partitioning is that you can backup
> and restore partition-wise. You can also use different mount
> options (such as noatime where you don't need it, and even
> noexec when you want to prevent accidental executions).

Oh, I'm poor reader, sorry about mentioning similar things above before reading this.

Valeri

> You
> can also "switch" between certain environments or even /home
> subtrees if needed. For large-scale data recovery, it's also
> easier to work with separated partitions, for example, if you
> need to recover something from /home, you can leave /usr, /tmp,
> and /var out of scope entirely, and those partitions won't be
> subject to recovery attempts - you can concentrate on /home.
> However, this partitioning approach is historically grown (as
> it initially wasn't about partitions on the same disk, but about
> different physical swappable disks with limited capacity as well
> different speed) and doesn't fit all modern needs. Especially for
> home system, having one / partition often is the best solution.
> And UFS's fixed size partitioning (with previous planning!)
> doesn't make it fit for changing purposes.
> 
> 
> 
>> Have you tried accepting the ZFS option?
> 
> The initial question probably was UFS-centered, as with using
> ZFS, you can resize partitions any time you want, and it's a lot
> easier to manage them. Everything mentioned above can easily be
> done with ZFS, and more.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Polytropon
> Magdeburg, Germany
> Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
> Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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