Re: [gentoo-user] Re: 500 meg / partition (including /boot) *WITHOUT USING LVM*

[Alan McKinnon]

On Wednesday 05 September 2007, Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 10:45:15AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote
>
> > You will always have a pretty good idea how much space / needs, it
> > contains /bin, /sbin, /etc, /root and /lib. Unless oyu are in the
> > habit of storing stuff in /root, 500M is plenty. So put / on a
> > regular partition, everything else in LVM and your initramfs
> > worries go away.
>
> s/LVM/a partition using the rest of the hard drive/

I disagree with your entire approach.

You are saying that you do not want to have to deal with LVM so your 
solution is to create one ginormous partition, stick everything on it 
and --bind mount directories from there to /usr, /var, etc. Sonow you 
have pieces of one big file system scattered all over your directory 
tree.

What have you gained? Nothing that I can see, so you are going to have 
to explain this in detail so we can all understand why you are even 
starting this at all.

From where I sit, you have gained nothing at all over one big filesystem 
mounted at /. You do not have the benfits of separate filesystems, you 
do not have the flexibility of LVM, you do not have the safety of 
separate mount points, you do not have the ability to mount various 
parts of the file system with different options. In fact, you have gone 
through several layers of symlinks to come back to the same place.

How is this better than a 500G filesystem mounted at /?
>
>   This is how I started the whole thread.
>
> > The only thing you need worry about is where are you going to get a
> > decent howto that explains the concepts. You are dealing with three
> > layers of stuff on top of physical partitions and some docs out
> > there are ... confusing. Once you get the picture fully, it's as
> > easy pie and makes perfect sense.
>
>   Remove the LVM layer and things become even easier.

Now I absolutely insist that you explain your reasoning and stop making 
assertions without backing them up. Give reasons, examples and numbers 
please.  

> > Really, LVM is the answer to all those prayers you have been
> > sending up to $DEITY for years :-)
>
>   With few exceptions, it's an answer looking for a problem.

Again, back this up please. If you assert that LVM is complex, then I 
will agree with you. Because guess what? kernels are complex, software 
is the most complex machine we humans have ever designed and admining a 
box IS rocket science. But if you say that LVM is useless without 
giving actual examples, then I'm afraid I'm going to have to call BS on 
that one. 

Tell you what, I'll go first:

1. What exactly are the few exceptions where LVM is not an answer 
looking for a problem, and actually is valid? Seeing as there are so 
few of them according to you, you should be able to rattle them off in 
a quick reply while asleep.

2. Please explain in detail how you will create a 4TB file system 
without LVM. This is NOT an edge case, this is a very real situation 
that occurs in data centres daily.

3. Take your proposal and explain to me in detail how you will prevent a 
backdoor or trojan from installing and executing scripts in /tmp 
and /var. Considering the massive problem that Windows has caused the 
world through an inability to do this, I would say this is a very 
important thing to be able to.

alan


-- 
Optimists say the glass is half full,
Pessimists say the glass is half empty,
Developers say wtf is the glass twice as big as it needs to be?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five
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