[colug-432] go pratitionless

[Richard Hornsby]

On Jan 27, 2014, at 20:39 , Rick Troth <rmt at casita.net> wrote:

> Suggestion: make the whole disk one EXT3 (or EXT4) and lose the
> partition table. You don't save any appreciable space, but you remove
> one layer of admin/config consideration.
> 
>> ...
> 
> Not that partitionless is a silver bullet, but concerns like this go
> away. Ahhh…

Try LVM.  At first it is more complex and daunting than fdisk and physical partitions, but once you get the hang of it you'll find it much more flexible and easier to work with.

For desktops, one large filesystem (aka partition in physical terms) might work okay.  Not sure it is a great idea in that situation, but is generally considered a pretty bad idea for servers.  In a one filesystem/partition setup, filling up /tmp or /home also causes there to be no space available for the system to write to /var (or /tmp), which in turn can crash processes and possibly bring down the box, but at the very least leave it in an unknown state.

If you have separate filesystems, filling up /home doesn't break anything else.  Even filling up /tmp isn't as bad as when /var also runs out of space.