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On 06/09/13 08:42, Neil Winchurst wrote:
> Well, I did ask, thanks. I will print the relevant parts of this and
> study at leisure! One lesson learned, do it properly in the first
> place. I will also research some more, especially as you seem to
> suggest that a separate home partition may not be a good thing??
>
> Support for the ubuntu distros has now been reduced to 9 months
> instead of the previous 18 months, except for the LTS versions of
> course. This is one reason for my question. It seems that moving to
> the next version in future is going to be needed more often, and I
> always do a fresh install as opposed to an upgrade.
>
> Neil
The separate /home partition thing really comes down to a matter of
choice I think - in my experience the majority of skilled linux users
swear by having a separate /home (although nearly always on the same
disk as /, which to me seems a bit silly and self-defeating - it's like
keeping your backups on the same system as you're backing up).
Personally I don't bother unless there is a specific usage case for it,
which in my case, is following documented partitioning practices for
certain usually highly secured systems. None of my personal machines
have ever had a separate /home unless it's being NFS mounted or something.
A *much* better approach is available, but is still a bit uncomfortably
bleeding edge at the moment - presuming a personal system, with just one
hard drive available for your OS (although you may have others for
storing data, etc), the way all systems will run in the future is on top
of snapshotting, copy-on-write next-gen combined volume
management/partitioning/filesystem tools. I.e., BTRFS or ZFS (+ ReFS in
windows land, Veritas etc in SAN land). You'll just point your OS
installer at the disk, or disks, you want to use and that's it -
arbitrary subvolumes can be mounted/cloned/destroyed/moved/copied at any
point in time and any position on the hierarchy, fully managed by
setting quotas, trim sizes and so on. Fedora already has the cool but
slightly buggy option of installing to a native BTRFS /, and then /home
(and any other partitions like /var, /opt, etc) can be created and
mounted as a snapshot-able subvol:
[ghost@debaser ~]$ cat /etc/fedora-release
Fedora release 20 (Rawhide)
[ghost@debaser ~]$ sudo btrfs subvolume show /
/
Name: root
uuid: 23609dc4-c3b2-5648-bcbd-d1f6bfae50e6
<snip>
Snapshot(s):
yum_20130818010757
yum_20130820000810
See the snapshots? Even cooler, they're automatically triggered when I
update! Behold:
[ghost@debaser ~]$ sudo yum update
<snip>
Transaction test succeeded
Running transaction
fs-snapshot: snapshotting /: /yum_20130906171143
Updating : libgcc-4.8.1-7.fc21.x86_64...
If an update screws up and completely destroys the system, I can just
toss it out, restore the snapshot and carry on. Or do multiple
test-upgrades with different parameters until I get the result I like,
diff my snapshots down for comparison and eventually select the one I
like and keep the others on-disk for reference. All of which is almost
free in terms of disk overhead. This is all so much space-aged
brilliance compared with the dumb old RAID, LVM, manually set
partitioning and frankly shite filesystems like Ext2/3/4, etc.
Sadly, I'd have to hesitate before recommending BTRFS as the way to go
quite yet as it's still in heavy development, rather complicated, a bit
user-unfriendly and has bugs - some of them fatal. But it is coming, and
mark my words, will be the default on all sane Linux installs within 5
years (10 years for Slackware). Once they've got some genuinely nice
user-friendly GUI tools to manage all the complicated bits (think of the
TimeMachine interface in Mac OS as a rare example of a versioned backup
store done right) we'll all be on it for everything.
The elephant in the room remains ZFS, which is light years ahead of
BTRFS (i.e., it already works in production and has for years) and has
all this functionality plus way, way more. Sadly, due to Sun's biggest
moment of spiteful stupidity in licensing it under the intentionally
GPL-hostile CDDL, it will probably never see easy and legal inclusion in
Linux. Which is a crying shame, because it really is the final word in
all aspects of putting stuff on storage devices, at every level.
As usual, I expect this reply has not only been not particularly useful
to you (Neil) but probably largely incomprehensible! Definitely don't
bother printing this out for later reference - just wait a couple of
years and as usual the bleeding edge stuff will stabilise, filter into
the enduser distros you're used to and just transparently take care of
everything for you. Creating separate /home partitions will become
obsolete in the new brave world of proper disk/filesystem management.
Cheers
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