odd partition scheme

[Master of Reality]

Is it possible to have say... /boot and /etc on one partition and then the rest of / on another??

[Jenda]

I don't think it is... just like you can't have a /something mountpoint serve two partitions. Or can you?

[Void Main]

Sure you can. Just move "/etc" under "/boot" and then create a symbolic link to it on "/" (ln -s /boot/etc /etc). I don't know why you would want to though. :) "/etc" definitely is in the proper place on a "/" partition. "/boot" only exists because of placement and raid constraints of the kernel on certain hardware. Depending on your setup you may not even need a "/boot" partition. The "/boot" directory can usually go on "/" without a problem as long as you aren't doing RAID/LVM, or have extremely large and quirky boot drives (BIOS limitations, etc).

[Master of Reality]

symbolic link... so simple

well my thunkpad360's 360M HD is gonna have /boot and /etc, along with a decent swap partition, and then im going to put the root filesystem on a USB drive.

At least thats mhat im going to try to do.

[Calum]

just out of interest, why does /etc need to be on there as well?

[Ice9]

maybe because /etc is where a lot of configuration files specific to his laptop are stored?

[Calum]

that makes sense i suppose. but surely by the time the contents of /etc are needed, the kernel will be up, and that will mean that / is mounted, no?

[Master of Reality]

just out of interest, why does /etc need to be on there as well?

the real question is; why not?

[Void Main]

I'm typing this from firefox running off my 256MB Cruzer USB memory stick. I installed Damn Small Linux on it and it is just awesome! The great thing is it only uses 50MB on the pen drive and you still have 200MB free for other stuff. Quite amazing linux distro! It's extremely easy to install as it can be done right from the fluxbox menu. Download DSL, burn the 50MB image to a CD (I burned it to a DVDRW because I'm just going to erase it again). Boot the CD and on the fluxbox menu select Apps->Tools->InstallToUSBPenDrive. I selected "For USB-HDD Pendrive" and 2 minutes later I rebooted to the pendrive. I had to find it in the BIOS and move it before the real HD in the boot order on my Thinkpad R40.

Screen shot I just took.

[Ice9]

Calum wrote:

that makes sense i suppose. but surely by the time the contents of /etc are needed, the kernel will be up, and that will mean that / is mounted, no?

Yes of course, but this way I guess it would be kind of possible to take the usb pen drive and stick it in another machine and work from there ... no?

[Calum]

i'm not following you.

this usb stick idea sounds even better than the live CD idea though you know.

[Ice9]

Calum wrote:

i'm not following you.

Maybe I'm talking rubbsih here but I got the idea of multiple workstations with nothing but basic configuration and a usb stick that would act as a complete portable environment for all those workstations.
You cold take your complete desktop environment with you on that usb stick, plug it in any pc and work on the same files and stuff ...

But as I said maybe I'm talking rubbish here.
That's the idea I got when I first read MOR's question.

[Calum]

aha! i understand you now!
so basically, your users would have a usb stick each, and it would contain the entire linux system on it, except for the /boot and /etc directories. than you could have thinclients with a small HDD on each one, just to hold the /etc and /boot directories and contents. this way you could alter the contents of /etc independently of people's USB sticks.

I see a big problem with this though, you can't administrate systems which people have physically got on their person. In that scenario, i would much rather have the client machines contain the entire system (they will have to have something to store /boot and /etc on anyway, so why not have the whole system on there?) and have the users simply carry their own /home directories around. This'd give you much more control over the apps they can use, whether the users are allowed to log on at specific terminals et c -

what do you reckon? have i missed something?

[Ice9]

Calum wrote:

I see a big problem with this though, you can't administrate systems which people have physically got on their person.

Yeah, this would definitely not work in a corporate environment but I was thinking more of an advantage for a single user on multiple machines (myself in this case), or multiple users on a single machine - they could have their entire customized system by hand without ever hosing the base system.

This is obviously not - like you pointed out - something to consider in case of production environments where users have to be "guided and administered"