[Techtalk] /usr Partition

[Mary]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2006, Val Henson wrote:
> In the old days, UNIX systems used to have a bunch of different
> partitions, mainly because disks were (a) small, (b) slow.  Also file
> systems were really delicate and it was nice to only have your /var
> screwed up.  Unfortunately, a lot of people are still partitioning up
> their modern 60GB super fast drives running ext3 like it was 1972, and
> all it does is make for headaches when one partition or another fills
> up.

For systems on which you run servers, some people still argue for a
separate /var too. The reason for that is that /var generally holds log
output, and if you have a long running process that somehow goes logging
mad, it can fill your drive, and while many processes don't like having
a full /var, they really hate a full /

A relatively common setup I've seen is to have ~5GB for /var on modern
hard-drive sizes, and set some kind of monitoring up to notify people
when it hits about 70% capacity.

-Mary