10.4 minimums

[Sandy Harris]

On 7/3/10, J <dreadpiratejeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> ... the stuff in /var does nothing to
>  make your computer run faster... as they say, it holds state files,
>  caches, spools, logs and stuff like that.  And yes, I supposed if you
>  run out of space on a /var partition or your hard disk itself, you'll
>  definitely see a performance and stability problem...
>
>  BUT, if you don't know whether or not you have a separate /var
>  partition, you probably don't.  The default partitioning scheme for
>  Ubuntu (for a while now) is a / partition and a swap partition.  To
>  double check this, you can run the 'mount' command and see what's
>  mounted...
>
>  if you see an entry in the output that says /var, then you have a var
>  partition, otherwise, /var is part of the / partition, thus, if you
>  fill up your root FS, things won't be able to write to /var and thus,
>  hilarity ensues.

At least for some servers, a separate /var is often recommended.
Then if you get some rogue process, or buggy script, or someone
breaking into the box producing massive log files or spool files,
/var fills up but / and /tmp are OK so your system may stay up.

I use a separate /var on my desktop box, just for safety, but
this is almost certainly unnecessary for most users.