[BlueOnyx:09409] Re: 5107R release and self-partitioning

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Chuck,

> I'd just like to be able to install without LVM.  I've personally never
> realized any benefits from LVM - not once.  

We use LVM, as there can only be four primary partitions on any disk and 
BlueOnyx uses six:

/boot 	(500MB)
/		(6144MB)
/var		(4096MB)
/tmp		(2048MB)
Swap	(4096MB)
/home	(rest of available space)

A separate /boot is a must have for a couple of reasons, some of which deal 
with RAID, some of which deal with potential disk sizes and drawbacks of the 
boot-loader. 

We also need a separate /home so that we can enable disk quota there. Swap 
naturally needs it's own partition as well. And we need place for "/", which 
adds another partition. That's four already.

Must /var and /tmp have their own partitions? The benefit of giving /tmp its 
own partition is that we can mount it "noexec,nosuid", which prevents some 
malice. And having the logfiles and mailqueue in a separate /var partition 
helps to some degree (but not entirely) to prevent that the system partition 
fills up to a point where damage to critical files prevents booting.

There can be only four primary partitions, so if we want to use six 
partitions, some of them must reside either in an LVM, or in an extended 
partition. As /boot cannot be in an extended partition and Swap shouldn't be 
in an extended partition, this limits our options a bit about what can be 
extended and what not.

> When there is a crash and you have to recover data from a LVM disk. 

Uhm. In the last eight years I had to do that like three or four times - for 
people who had no backups. Even then this just adds a few extra steps to the 
mounting procedure, so I wouldn't consider this a particular downside.

> Without that "self-partition" ability, I assume the ability to do a
> "non-LVM" installation is gone too?

Correct. 

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber