F15 to F16 upgrade via DVD does not recognize previous installation

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 11/15/2011 04:04 PM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Greg Woods wrote:
>
>>> I may be getting hit by bug 748119
>>>
>>>     https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=748119
>>>
>>> as my /var is mounted on a different filesystem than /
>>
>> I have the same issue, and my /var is also mounted on a separate file
>> system (which I thought was standard practice; who wants root to fill up
>> because a logging process runs wild?)
>
> I've often wondered if it made sense to keep /var on a separate partition.
> I did it for a time, but then gave up as I couldn't remember
> why I was doing it.
Various application fill /var at run-time.

Keeping /var on a separate partition is a simple means to avoid 
malfunctions of the systems by something filling up the "whole 
diskspace" by accident or by malicious users, and thus to cause "denial 
of services".

A classical example would be filling up a servers' spool area (often 
under /var) by huge print jobs or by huge emails.

A Fedora/RH specific classic such case is users setting "keepcache=1" in 
/etc/yum.conf and them then forgetting to cleanup /var/cache/yum. At 
some point they wonder why they are running out of disk-space.

Ralf