> Robert Davies wrote:
> > One possible con I've spotted is that having / and /usr on different
disks
> > makes you more vulnerable to disk failure. On some UNIX systems /lib
stuff
> > is really in /usr/lib, and /usr contents are generally pretty useful, so
it
> > may make recovery harder....
>
> Robert, you really need to try Slackware!!!
> True story from a couple of years back: /usr is trashed, so I boot
without it,
> mount /usr from another machine via NFS (read-only!), use that to fix the
duff
> partition, and reboot. 15 minutes work and all problems sorted.
To avoid accidentally spreading misinformation, I _did_ mean UNIX, and not
Linux, AFAIK Linux distro's and (as someone rightly mentioned) the FHS mean
/lib is seperate and under /, not /usr/lib.
But, having / & /usr together on one disk still makes sense, as the bulk of
the system is in /usr, but / is needed to boot and work in single user mode,
I often mounted man pages etc in single user mode, when doing recovery for
the other disks, 'what are those fsck options again'? Because they are both
mostly read-only in operation, then you benefit from the disk cache, and
there's not much to gain by splitting across 2 disks.
If you loose / or /usr you're faced with an hour or two's fun with restore,
to get the system back up, so it makes sense to put your eggs in one basket,
and have them both go together.
The ability to mount /usr read only was also a good point from Ted, though
I've found that more useful on client networked workstations, where /usr,
/usr/local and /opt are mount read-only from a file server. You get a few
problems with users, if you have to take the server down, to remount /usr
read-write to install software! Due to /etc, /root and /boot directories
personally I wouldn't be tempted to make / read only. Better to take a
tripwire snapshot, and/or an rdist(1) or (possibly?) rsync(1) tree of
critical system files to detect, unauthorised modification.
Rob
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