[SPARCbook] Best Hard drive configuration

Mon Nov 15 10:35:38 CST 1999

> 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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