Re: A bold idea (Re: Carrying Attributes too Far)

[David Masover <jedi@ninja.dynup.net>]

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Hubert Chan wrote:

>>>>>>"David" == David Masover <jedi@ninja.dynup.net> writes:
>>>>>>            
>>>>>>
>
>[...]
>
>David> Now, why would I use separate filesystems in the first place?
>David> Two reasons: performance and security.  Right now, it's a lot
>David> easier to have /var be a certain sized partition rather than
>David> trying to enforce disk quotas. ...
>
>There's more to security and good administration than just disk quotas.
>You can have different partitions mounted read-only.[1] You have
>  
>
And how is that different than chmod -x?  Root can remount a partition 
writable just as easily as chmod'ing a file, unless the partition is 
something like iso9660.

>different mount attributes such as nodev, nosuid, noexec.  You may even
>want to take advantage of the fact that you can't hardlink across
>partitions (you don't want users to be able to hardlink programs from
>/usr/bin).  Separate partitions also allows you to easily reinstall by
>  
>
Why not?  (Naive question -- I can't see any problem here.)

>blowing away your root partition (after copying your /etc), e.g. if
>your system gets compromised.  And so forth.
>  
>
There are many ways of doing this, including:  copy to a network server, 
make a temporary partition (after resizing the main one), burning a CD, etc.

>[1] This presents another problem to hardlinking across partitions.
>What if you try to hardlink a file from a read-only partition onto a
>read-write partition (or vice versa)?  A hardlink is supposed to be
>  
>
I argued not for hardlinking across partitions, but for improving 
flexibility and raw speed to where none of the usual reasons for having 
multiple partitions (or for hardlinking across partitions) matters.
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