Re: [PLUG] linux best practices

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

On 13 Apr, 2005, at 02:31, Len Pikulski wrote:
> We have found that different distributions have different "home" areas 
> for applications.
>
> Backups are at least /etc, /home, /var/log (on important servers), 
> /var/spool/mail (on mail servers), etc.......

This is much more the truth than folks would like to believe.

While there are preferred locations, as Dan pointed out, unless you are 
running a large site and enforcing your own standards, the 
probabilities that "everything" will wind up there is low.

In the early days of the net (ARPAnet, NSFnet etc.) software packages 
were independent items.
They also tended to be standalone and did not integrate or require 
integration with "other software."

/usr/local used to be where you installed everything that didn't come 
from the OS vendor.
It was its own tree containing "bin, lib, etc, usr" and so on 
directories.

Then came the divergence of platforms and centralized serving, so you 
found /var come into play for the storage of things unique to a 
specific platform - config files, log files, and so on.

With the rise of "systems" of packages (typically "ports" to a 
platform) in recent years, the
original locations were consolidated into another tree.

Some vendors (notably sun) started with /opt as the location for 
"optional packages" -- software supplied (i.e. ported) by the vendor to 
this particular OS level, but not required to be installed as part of 
the basic OS install.

Most BSD derivatives have a "man hier" page which describes their file 
system "defaults" -- however, they tend to be more the "ideal" than the 
"reality."


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
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whmagill@gmail.com

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