Does anyone reuse /boot or /var partitions ?

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2015-01-23 at 12:16 +0530, Rejy M Cyriac wrote:
> On 01/23/2015 04:24 AM, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 01:36:35PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > > There's a proposed anaconda patch ATM which would disallow 
> > > mounting an existing partition as /boot or /var (or any 
> > > subdirectory of those except /var/www ) without reformatting it. 
> > > i.e., you can't reuse an existing partition with those 
> > > mountpoints.
> > 
> > Well, somebody with a carefully crafted configuration in 
> > /var/named/, for example, presumably will be not very happy.  I 
> > wonder why /var/www/ is singled out for a special treatment?
> > 
> > > The main driving force for this is 
> > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1074358
> > 
> > And /var comes into this picture how?  Just curious.

> > 
> And why the subdirectories in /var cannot be mountpoints for 
> existing partitions ? There are a way lot of subdirectories, where 
> partitions with existing data would have to be mounted, like www, 
> ftp, tftp, named, spool/mail ....

I couldn't say precisely why, I don't know the background of why the 
design is that way. I'd guess the logic is that there's nothing 
important in /var itself, it's all subdirectories of /var we care 
about, and it's 'better' to whitelist known-OK ones than blacklist 
known-bad ones. The 'allowed' and 'disallowed' lists can be adjusted 
and extended, as I mentioned, it's not a difficult thing to do in 
theory to allow /var/ftp , /var/tftp , /var/named , /var/spool ... but 
it'd have to go through anaconda patch review/discussion.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
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