|
 By
Jose Salvador Gonzalez Rivera
Debian has a package manager (DPKG) that resolves dependency problems automatically.
It help us to automatically keep up to date programs looking for new versions
on the internet, resolving and completing the files and libraries dependencies
which a package requires, making system administration easy and keeping us up
to date with the new security changes. It also shows some important and substantial
security features: it doesn't have commercial goals, also doesn't obey mercantile
urgencies, It has a good pursuit of errors, problems are fixed in less than 48
hours and it's priority is to develop a complete and reliable operating system.
Before Installing
From a security and reliability standpoint, it's better to have separate hard
disk partitions for directories that are large, and especially to separate those
which are frequently-changing (/tmp and /var) from those that can be mounted read-only
except when installing software (/usr). Some people also make separate partitions
for /home and /usr/local. Separate partitions mean that if one gets corrupted,
the others won't be affected. It also means you can mount some partitions (especially
/usr and /boot) read-only except when doing system administration: this decreases
the likelihood of corruption or mistakes dramatically. Don't do the distribution
default, which is usually to put everything in one partition. Of course, you can
go overboard if you use too many partitions, and if you don't anticipate your
sizes correctly you may end up with wasted space in some partitions and not enough
space in others. In that case you'll either have to back up the files and repartition,
or use symbolic links to steal space from another partition. Both strategies are
undesirable, so think beforehand about how many partitions are appropriate for
this machine, which directories contain irreplaceable data, and leave some extra
space for unexpected additions later. |
