Re: /var and /home on another partition

From: steven mestdagh (steven.mestdagh_at_esat.kuleuven.REMOVE-THIS.ac.be)
Date: 09/05/04 

Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2004 17:38:47 GMT

Frederick <frederick@shaw.ca> wrote:
> Thanks for your response Steven. I really appreciate it.
> Can I ask you something else? Like I mentioned before, I dont' want to lose
> anything in /var or /home so can I use fdisk to make 2 slices and then I use
> disklabel to put /, /usr, /tmp in the first slice while putting /var and
> /home in the 2nd slice?
>
> Is that the best way of doing it? Or is it better to put everything in one
> slice. I ask because I'm not sure if everything gets formatted or
> overwritten during an install on slice 1.

well, i've never had 2 OpenBSD slices so far. the default way of doing
things is to just create an openbsd slice, and then fill this up with
separate filesystems (think you can have about 16 of them in 1 slice).
never had any problems with it.
note that disklabel shows partitions on the entire disk, not only the
OpenBSD portion of it. the OpenBSD partitions run from a to h, other
partitions (for instance DOS, ext2fs) are designated by letters
greater than i.

note also that the openbsd upgrade (!= install) process will touch files
only in /bin, /sbin, /usr (not /usr/local) directories.
on the other hand, /var, /home, and also your /etc containing all
configuration files are never touched by the upgrade process, which
is another built-in safety. 

-- 
steven

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