From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Hubert Chan Subject: Re: A bold idea (Re: Carrying Attributes too Far) Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2003 11:37:22 -0500 Sender: news Message-ID: <87zne7xltp.fsf@uhoreg.ca> References: <1065247084.3f7e616c94ec9@webmail.st-andrews.ac.uk> <3FCE3716.8000509@namesys.com> <1070584227.3fcfd1a3d67f4@webmail.st-andrews.ac.uk> <3FD00272.7040607@ninja.dynup.net> <1070617453.5605.13.camel@schlappix.schnulli.de> <3FD08F73.4070404@ninja.dynup.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Return-path: list-help: list-unsubscribe: list-post: Errors-To: flx@namesys.com List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: reiserfs-list@namesys.com >>>>> "David" == David Masover 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 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 blowing away your root partition (after copying your /etc), e.g. if your system gets compromised. And so forth. [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 essentially the same on both sides, so will you be able to write the to the file or not? Whichever one you choose, something breaks. -- Hubert Chan - http://www.uhoreg.ca/ PGP/GnuPG key: 1024D/124B61FA Fingerprint: 96C5 012F 5F74 A5F7 1FF7 5291 AF29 C719 124B 61FA Key available at wwwkeys.pgp.net. Encrypted e-mail preferred.