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SubjectRe: Volume Managers in Linux
Florian Lohoff wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 03, 1998 at 11:45:22AM -0500, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:
> I disagree with you in that point. When i talked to Heinz at the Linux
> Kongress in Germany i dreamed of a simple install with removed complexity
> where most of the Newbies fail - Partitioning. Think of having an installation
> where you ONLY have to choose the harddrive and possibly ONE partition and
> the installer will automatically create a /usr /tmp /var /home / and swap
> logical volume(s) and the user does NOT have to care on choosing the sizes
> for those because they will be increased on installation automatically
> (If we have an LVM AND resizeable filesystems)
>
> If you ever installed an AIX you whish of doing this with your
> linux distribution - Just choose Harddrive, language and dont care.
> It will install in small 4MB partitions for / /var /tmp /usr /home
> and you will be able to increase them for your needs after
> the systems comes up finally.
>
> You sure need big file support bug i think big file support is something
> for BIG SERVERS serving Databases with >2GB Data volume. This is
> 5000 serves in the World - End users you have millions nowerdays.
>

Please, Can anoyone explain to me why you want to create separate filesystems for
/ /usr /tmp/ /var /home. I really cant find any use for this! and I am speking
from over 10 yrs of experinece with lost of different unix systems here. And what
I want is reliable systems that dont fail because some filesystem that went full.

This is to me just something we do out of old habit but no one I have argued over
this has any good reason why you should do this.

I always only create two partitions root and swap on my disks. This goes for
linux BDS variants and of course Solaris and HP and Digital UNIX and AIX which
I also manage. On HP and Aix you have to have two disks and move the installation
to a new (not stupidly partitioned by the install program) disk with only root
and swap partitions on. Usually I make swap 2* max memory expected to be put in
in the box and the root filesystem for the rest.

My resason for this is mainly (KISS). I have come by HP and AIX boxes that have
actually crashed beacuse the people who did the original installation did to slim
/ and /usr or whatever partitions.

The need for growing and shrinking partitions on HP and AIX seems to stem from
this philosophy of makin a lot of filesystems and making them slim so we have a
lot of free space to grow in.... And yes I know AIX has an autogrow feature but
this only pushes the problem of full filesystems to the limit where your disks
are full. Its no better than having all free space in the existing root
filesystem. Actually it's worse since you go out of disk sooner since the free
space in the other partitions can't be usen or is there an autoshrink feature
also.

What wrong with having a big / partition with lots of free space to grow in. And
leave the fragmentation/quota issues to the filesystem implementation.

When you later install orcacle/informix or whaterver application on these systems
you really want to put these on separate disks. Maybe you also want to use raid
striping and/or mirroring which md currently can handle.

I do miss the ability to stripe mirrored partitions. I dont want the whole mirror
to go down because one disk in the stipe went down as is the case when you do
mirroring of stripes.

Hans Eric Sandstrom


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