[CentOS] CentOS 6.5 install

Fri Feb 28 15:33:16 UTC 2014
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On 02/28/2014 08:45 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 7:28 AM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote:
>> This keeps /home and /var in separate filesystems, too, and there are
>> advantages to that.
> 'Resize as needed'  is not at all the same as sharing a pool of space.

Exactly, and I would posit that that is desirable when dealing with 
/home and /var.

>   There are sometimes advantages to having things not share disk heads
> or spindles, but you don't need LVM for that, and sometimes (rarely)
> you might want to reinstall without reformatting /home,
>

The nice thing about LVM in this context is that you can take the whole 
non-root volume group and import it into the new machine with minimal 
effort.  /var is a bit tedious, but /home on the other hand benefits 
greatly from this.  And I've used a separate /home since... well, since 
RHL betas were named after cities.  I've reinstalled without 
reformatting /home on my whatever-is-the-current-hardware personal 
machine over a hundred times since 1998, and have *kept* the *same* 
/home (in essence).  Admittedly, I have had to move some things out of 
the way (.kde, and a few other configs over the years) and of course 
I've moved it to different drives (about two dozen at this point, not 
counting backups), but my /home today still contains files from 1998, 
when I first started doing this (you know, things like old TRS-80 disk 
images for the xtrs emulator that I pulled from 20-year-old-media in the 
1998-2002 timeframe).

While it would not be technically true that I've never reformatted /home 
during the install, since when moving to a new drive it is a bit easier 
to do the install with the existing /home partition or volume group 
unmounted, then edit /etc/fstab later, or even install to a scratch new 
drive, leaving the space for /home to later be copied over from the old 
media or a backup, but in essence I've gone 16 years with pretty much 
the same, ever-changing, /home on my personal machine.