You can have up to 63 partitions on an IDE hard disk. A SCSI hard disk can have up to
15 partitions. You won??™t need nearly that many partitions.
If you are using Linux as a desktop system, you probably don??™t need a lot of different partitions.
There are, however, some very good reasons for having multiple partitions for Linux systems that
are shared by a lot of users or are public Web servers or file servers. Multiple partitions within
Fedora Linux, for example, offer the following advantages:
Protection from attacks??”Denial of Service attacks sometimes take actions that try to
fill up your hard disk. If public areas, such as /var, are on separate partitions, a successful
attack can fill up a partition without shutting down the whole computer. Because /var
is the default location for Web and FTP servers, and expected to hold a lot of data, entire
hard disks often are assigned to the /var file system alone.
Protection from corrupted file systems??”If you have only one file system (/), its
corruption can cause the whole Linux system to be damaged. Corruption of a smaller
partition can be easier to fix and often allows the computer to stay in service while the
correction is made.
Table 7-2 lists some directories that you may want to consider making into separate file system
partitions.
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