[SPARCbook] Best Hard drive configuration

[Stephen Dowdy]

> From: "Scott D. Yelich" <scott at scottyelich.com>
> Just make / and swap.

There are some distinct advantages to having unique mountpoints.  I'm more
familiar with SunOS 4.x, so some of this might not apply to SunOS 5.x

1) fragmentation
   If you have /var mounted within /, then the entire partition will
   frag affecting everything, not just your volatile file partitions.

2) security
   Often root-kit type exploits will involve somehow creating setuid
   binaries inside /tmp or /var/spool/*...  If you mount your non-usr
   partitions with 'nosuid' flags, many of these common exploits will fail
   to function.  You could, i suppose, use a loopback file system with
   'nosuid' on top of your single / partition to emulate this.

3) reliability
   file system corruption on one partition might not be fatal.  With a
   single filesystem, you risk being dead on any failure.

That all said, i would suggest you at least create a / partition along
with a /usr

  (make /var a symlink into /usr/VAR, and /tmp a symlink into /usr/TMP
  or a 'tmpfs' mount, or use loopback mounts onto such things, which is
  waaaay gross, but there's no perfect solution).

That way you have a reasonably secure and stable / partition that will be
unaffected by catastrophes in /usr.  (seems i'm using about 16MB on my
/ partition, so i'd recommend doing a 24MB / for some lee-way.

--stephen
--
Stephen Dowdy - Systems Administrator - CS Dept - Univ of Colorado, Boulder
dowdy at cs.colorado.edu - 303-492-6196 - http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~dowdy/
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