[CentOS] Re: questions on kickstart

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008, Les Mikesell wrote:
>Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
>>On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 at 4:32pm, Ross S. W. Walker wrote
>>
>>>I think you might be missing a little something in there, like /boot?
>>
>>/boot is not required to be its own partition.  In the days of yore, 
>>when BIOSes couldn't boot from partitions the crossed the 1024 cylinder 
>>barrier, it made sense to have a small /boot as your first partition. 
>>These days?  Not so much.
>
>There are still good reasons to keep it separate.  For example you may 
>want / on something grub doesn't understand like LVM or raid (raid1 can 
>pretend it isn't, but other levels won't work.  Or you may want to move 
>your / to a drive other than the one that boots.

I used to use the separate /boot partition, but quit when the 1024 sector
problem was solved, mostly because OS upgrades or installation of alternate
distributions in a different partition for ``/'' would frequently result in
a less than useful /boot setup.  Having /boot on the ``/'' file system
isn't as vulnerable to poorly written installation and upgrade scripts.

Being a belts and suspenders guy, I don't boot from raid or lvm file
systems as there are too many ways things can go bad.

I generally build systems with two identical ext3 partitions for ``/'' and
``/backroot', swap, and the remainder in ``/home''.  Once the system is
installed and configured, the ``/'' is copied to ``/backroot'' with the
``/backroot/etc/fstab'' file edited appropriately and ``/boot/grub/menu.lst''
set up to allow booting from the ``/backroot'' partion (which isn't
normally mounted).

This provides the ability to boot a damaged system from ``/backroot'', and
a fallback position if an upgrade goes south by refreshing the copy just
prior to doing the upgrade.

Bill
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