how big does /tmp need to be?

[Derek Broughton]

Bob Smith wrote:

> 
>> > The only reason I can think of to use a separate partition for
>> > anything, be it /var or /home, is to preserve that data when something
>> > else is being destroyed/overwritten.
> 
> Or to make sure it does get destroyed/overwritten, see below.
> 
>> People create partitions for other reasons too.
>> 
>> One is some kind of performance/disk size issues - e.g. /tmp is on a
>> separate faster drive, or it's local when all your other partitions
>> are NFS mounted.
> 
> Well, I want /tmp to be on an encrypted filesystem using the
> crypttab "tmp" option. I think this means the partition will be
> reinitialized at boot-up with a random key and an ext2 will be
> created from scratch on it.  (I have a spare 10GB partition I can
> use for this.)
> 
> There's nothing in /tmp that needs to persist between boots, is
> there?

By definition.  /usr/tmp is supposed to have files that can persist, but
Ubuntu has, at times - I'm not sure it's still doing it - set the system up
in such a way that /tmp, /var/lock and /var/run (and maybe /var/tmp)
actually get cleaned out on every boot.  This has led to some badly behaved
packages not working properly because they _expected_ to find an old file
in /tmp.
-- 
derek