Maurice Kinal wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 MK> Hello Roy.

 MK> 01 Sep 03 20:01, you wrote to me:

 RT> Right now I have:

 RT> / = /dev/hda1
 RT> swap = /dev/hda2
 RT> /home = /dev/hdb1
 RT> /var = /dev/hdb2

 RT> Those last two saved me a lot of grief last time I upgraded...

 MK> Yep.  I used to do the /var thingy but now I just leave it as part 
 MK> of the root partition and go with an archive partition instead.

I do have an "archives" directory somewhere.  And a
"downloads" directory,  and a few others.  I'm thinking of
setting up a directory right off the root and calling it "/data"
and stuffing all sorts of things right under it,  with links from elsewhere
if needed.

 MK> I really ought to clean that one up as well as my /home.

Yeah,  same here.

 MK> One of these days.

Yep!  :-)

 MK> I did manage to do a backup of them so I am not too worried about 
 MK> it.

 RT> I'll need to take a good look around before I actually go ahead and do
 RT> anything.

 MK> You shouldn't need too much from /etc if you're planning to install
 MK> 9.0.

I'm still not convinced that would be better than simply upgrading all of
the stuff,  in phases,  as long as I can figure out the right order for
doing things...

 MK> Maybe your ppp setup scripts.

All of that is sitting on the router.  Which I don't know if I'm going to
upgrade or not.

 MK> You could copy them to /home and then move them back after you 
 MK> install.

 RT> A UPS is definitely on my list of stuff to get.  Even if I can find
 RT> one which needs batteries,  since I have batteries...

 MK> Me too but my plan is to just use the batteries as a power source. 
 MK> The plan is to get all the computer stuff off the grid.  Having two
 MK> gel batteries would allow a backup while the other gets charged up.
 MK> They are extremely good batteries and if I keep everything to a 
 MK> minimum I think they should run for days, maybe even weeks, per
 MK> charge.  That is the plan.

Good luck with that.  For some reason 12v-input stuff seems to be pretty
scarce,  and I'm hoping that things will eventually move futher in that
direction.

 RT> My thinking exactly.  And I suspect that this is probably the reason
 RT> that ext2 is the last of several choices in the 8.1 install process.

 MK> Now reiserfs is the default with ext3 and ext2 being alternatives.

I'm going to have to read up on that some more before I can make a choice.

 MK> I go with ext3 myself.  Works good ... so far.  It's been some time
 MK> now and after the power outage yesterday it fired up without any 
 MK> problem.  If it had been ext2 it would have gone through all that
 MK> fscking for the three mounted partitions.  I like ext3.  :-)

Yeah,  but doesn't ext3 only journal the metadata and not the actual data
itself?  There's also jfs in there too,  as I recall.  And probably some
others out there on the 'net.  I need to do some research on this.

---