[nycbug-talk] Never mind

[Ray Lai]

On Sat, Aug 06, 2005 at 01:56:46PM -0400, Isaac Levy wrote:
> Basically, Apple threw out the slicing conventions alltogether- and  
> simply focused on protecting various directory trees using  
> permissions, (and now acl's etc...), which we do on other BSD's in  
> the first place.

Does it provide replacements for nosuid, noexec, and nodev mount
flags?

> With that, seeing as a modern filesystem, (Journaled HFS+ on OSX),  
> disk fragmentation is not an issue as it was in the past, so that  
> aspect of the reasons for partitioning is now moot.

Agreed.  However, fscking is still slower with one big disk.  (At
least on non-journaling filesystems.)  Also, keep in mind that
partitions where the data is changing a lot is more at risk to be
corrupted than one that never does, so while you may trash your
/tmp partition in a Frankenstein experiment, your /home partition
may be safe.  Unless you have them both together.

> Secondarily, in the context of a widely mixed-use, mixed-context  
> computer, (a User Desktop/Workstation), the applications run are  
> quite varied in behavior, resource needs, etc... so problems like  
> this browser issue are not really problems- (you have the whole disk  
> to use, and lots of visual/graphical/ui indicators for how much file  
> space you have on deck...)

Usually this can be solved by giving /home a huge partition.
`export TMPDIR=~/tmp' and you might not even touch /tmp anymore.
This still protects the only user of the system from preventing
syslog from working just because they left bittorrent on.

> So with that, there's also little risk, in many User/Desktop  
> contexts, of resource-based attacks which can't be solved by a user  
> easily- (deleting files when HD is too full...), so while I'll follow  
> rigid partitioning schemes on a server connected to the www, it  
> doesn't seem to be the same issue at all to me on my Laptop.

While I agree that partitions are much more important on a server
than on a laptop, I still give / 100MB, /tmp MFS, /var 100MB,
/usr/{,src,obj,ports,local} a gig or two or three each, and /home
the rest.  I can't wait until I have enough RAM to mount /usr/obj
MFS. =)

> --
> What does everyone else think of this?  Does anyone run another *BSD  
> as a desktop/laptop/workstation OS and simply live in one big /  
> partition?

Only on systems where I know I will wipe really really soon.  (Of
course, I wind up keeping them longer than usually, but eh....)

> UFS has fairly sophisticated schemes for suppressing disk  
> fragmentation, (actually, BSD OS really nailed this issue in the  
> filesystem years ago), so what does everyone think?

I thought it was more like decades ago.

> Run wild withone big / (!?!?)

I've just gotten so used to putting in the scheme I stated above
that I don't really think about my partitioning anymore.  I just
enjoy the extra mount flags OpenBSD provides after installation.

-Ray-