[Discuss] Reading Linux book

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

There doesn't seem to be a lot of controversy that a separate /boot 
partition is good.

On 03/26/2014 09:33 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:
> Regarding partition layouts, I don't bother with them any more beyond 
> a small /boot partition. All other file systems are under some kind of 
> volume manager that permits dynamic allocation and sizing.

I like having a different /home partition so that I will have more 
flexibility with future OS installs.

Assumption: Upgrades are technically hard to engineer and even harder to 
thoroughly test, and my starting condition before I do my upgrade will 
probably not be a tested case. The more that I want an OS upgrade to 
work (because I have done a lot of custom configuring I don't want to 
have to redo) the less likely it will be to work correctly (because I 
have made a lot of custom configuring). This is why I always maintain a 
file called adminlog.txt. It is my notes, an old fashioned journal with 
dated entries of what I do to the OS. If I need to reproduce my config, 
I can "replay" this journal.

So, for OS upgrades I do a fresh, complete install. Having an OS 
partition means I can install there, without touching my /home 
partition. If it works, I can then tweak things to use my old /home 
partition. Yes, there can be upgrade problems for home directories, too, 
but not blowing away all my files is a nice start.

Another partition consideration: Disks are cheap, on some of my machines 
I have dual "/" partitions for the OS, each complete and bootable. One 
is a trailing copy the other and I can revert to it by a simple reboot. 
When I have been running happily and some updates come along, I copy my 
running version over to the other side before the update--so I can again 
again revert if anything goes wrong.

This might be overly conservative and paranoid on the part of a 
dilettante (and I don't configure things this way always), but I have 
seen Linux computers where the Professional sysadmins don't do upgrades 
at all because they don't want to break things that are working. I 
suggest they have too much faith in the magical abilities of firewalls.

-kb