Sharing Partitions

[Christopher Browne]

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 1:19 PM,  <john.moniz-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I'm about to re-arrange the partitions on my main dual boot PC. I have
> already shrunk the Vista NTFS partition with gparted (no problems), just
> need to do redo the linux side of things.
>
> I intend to have two or three distros installed and would like to share as
> many partitions as possible. /home is a natural one to share and I figure
> that /opt and /usr/local should also be OK. Those are the main ones I'd like
> to make common to all. I was also wondering about /var (or at least
> /var/log). Would that be OK to share amongst the distros? I'm thinking /var
> may cause problems with package management? Any other possibilities?

/var seems likely to be exceedingly troublesome to share.

Traditionally, I used to keep /home and /usr/local on separate
partitions specifically to support this kind of thing.  Mind you, that
was back in the early '90s :-).

Of late, my tendency has been to have portions of /home be an SCM
archive, providing versioning on stuff I care to version, and for a
portion to be synchronized between hosts using Unison (for
not-so-versioned material :-)).

These days, I generally run Debian on things, and don't worry too much
about fiddling with different flavours of Linux.  Different flavours
don't tend to help terribly much; they seem instead to chew time I'd
rather spend on other things.

Were I going down that road, I think I'd use VMs as repositories for
the multiple systems.  Indeed, that seems a pretty good way to
compartmentalize configuration for complex services where I'd NOT be
using {SCM+CFengine} to manage deployment.

In the "bad old days," it was common to have servers managing {Mail,
DNS, Some Web Server App} where there would be ghastly quantities of
local customizations.  You'd be hard-pressed to recover if the server
failed.

If you instead run "messy stuff" in a VM, and back up the VM once in a
while, that seems a way to, well, keep the mess in a
hermetically-sealable place.
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