Thu, 15 Jan 2009
How not to enable ACLs
Yesterday, I wanted to test something involving ACLs on my laptop, so I had to enable them on my laptop's filesystem.
Since I don't believe in multiple filesystems for a laptop, that meant changing mount options on the root filesystem. Changing fstab is easy enough, but for changing the options on the live filesystem, you need to remount it.
No problem, I thought, there's '-o remount', right?
mount -o remount,acl /
Turns out that's not such a good idea. This morning, I boot up my laptop, and I'm greeted with the following message:
/dev/hda4 superblock features are different from backup, check forced
... which took quite a while, as usual. Sigh.
It's useful on a multi-user server where you want to partition 'home directories' away from 'system root' and/or 'shared network directory', since you don't want your server to die a horrible death from disk fill because someone thought it'd be nice to share 25TB of warez on the shared network directory.
Since my laptop is mine and nobody else's, having that protection serves no useful purpose. It's better not to partition it, so that I don't waste 7G because I have 500M on one partition, 700M on a second, 300M on a third, and no space to put this DVD image that I want to write to disk.
Kurt
Actually, I always partition off the OS from the user's data (/home), even on a laptop. I also have a spare partition in order to test install the next OS release without perturbing (too much) the current stable install.