[NTLUG:Discuss] /var out of space....help please

[Richard Cobbe]

Lo, on Wednesday, October 18, Steve Baker did write:

> Why do you have so many partitions?  I generally end up with
> one 'system' partition and one 'user' partition.  With things
> chopped up the way they are, you'll presumably have a situation
> where there is plenty of space left in one partition and yet you
> are desperately short in another.  That's a really tough thing
> to fix - but with one large system partition, whichever area needs
> the space can have it.

For a single user system, having lots of different partitions probably
doesn't make that much sense, although it's not that big a problem.  (Most
problems of the sort you described above can be fixed with a clever, if
messy, application of symbolic links.)

I think I started out the many-partitions route, ~5 years ago, because I
thought that was how most "official" Unix systems worked, and part of the
reason I was messing around with Linux was to understand "official"
Unices.  I've pretty much just kept on doing it that way.

In addition, some backup utilities, like cddump
(http://users.gtn.net/fraserm/cddump.html), tend to work at their best when
you apply them to entire partitions, rather than just directory trees.  In
particular, cddump doesn't do incremental backups on arbitrary directories,
only on partitions.  This is probably more of a concern with larger
installations, though.

Just for the shock value :-) , here's my current setup:

[minbar:~]$ df
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5               155545     86832     60683  59% /
/dev/sda1                31079      9161     20314  31% /boot
/dev/sda6              1383520    413824    899416  32% /home
/dev/sda8               822184    314084    466336  40% /opt
/dev/sda2              2632772   2083184    415848  83% /usr
/dev/sda7               147766     39040    101097  28% /var
/dev/hda1              2100360   1704364    395996  81% /win95
/dev/hda2               140000     21210    111561  16% /debian
/dev/hda3                46668        16     44243   0% /debian/tmp
/dev/hda5               964500     39968    875536   4% /debian/var
/dev/hda6               917072        20    870468   0% /debian/opt
/dev/sda9              1921156    581908   1241656  32% /debian/usr
/dev/sda10             1454668        56   1380716   0% /debian/home

Yep, *three* OSes.  (Well, two are Linux, but you know what I mean.)

Richard