[mdlug] What are the best practices for Linux partitioning & Mount points for Production systems

[Jonathan Billings]

On Fri, Mar 02, 2012 at 09:42:07AM -0500, Mark Montague wrote:
> I never give /usr its own partition any more -- this was valuable to do 
> in the 1990s to isolate filesystem corruption on / from affecting /usr 
> and vice-versa, which helped ensure that you'd be able to reboot into 
> single user mode to do filesystem repairs, and that no single filesystem 
> took "too long" to repair (with non-journaling filesystems, repair time 
> could sometimes grow as the square of the size of the filesystem).  But 
> with modern size disks, the efficiency of journaling filesystems 
> (filesystem repair time is now often linear with filesystem size), and 
> with filesystem corruption being much less common than it used to be, I 
> find it to be more efficient in terms of disk space, more flexible, and 
> simpler to have / and /usr share the same, large, partition.

Interestingly, Fedora is actually eliminating the distinction between
many directories in / and in /usr.

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge

and

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove

This makes having a separate /usr even less useful.

Of course, one would hope that in the near future, LVM, ZFS or a more
reliable btrfs (or even some new technology) will give us the ability
to treat the disk as a pool and partitions would just be a logical
structures in the pool. I'm still using plain old partitions for 99%
of our production systems now, because in most of the cases, the
systems don't need the additional complexity and are easier reproduced
by a wipe and reload. The important bits are stored elsewhere, either
via AFS, NFS or installed via configuration management.

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>