A mail server keeps filling its root filesystem because spooled mail and logs grow without bound, and when the disk fills the whole system becomes unusable. Which single change to the disk layout most directly contains that failure?
LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 102. Linux installation and package management medium
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How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Not correct Put /boot on its own filesystem
Wrong. A separate /boot exists so the boot loader can reach kernels and initramfs images on a simple filesystem; it is small, nearly static, and absorbs none of this growth.
Not correct Put /home on its own filesystem
Wrong for this workload. Separating /home protects user data across reinstalls and limits user-created growth, but the mail spool and logs are not under /home, so the root filesystem still fills.
Correct Put /var on its own filesystem
Correct. Mail spools (/var/spool/mail or /var/mail) and logs (/var/log) both live under /var, so giving /var its own filesystem means runaway growth fills only that filesystem and leaves the root filesystem writable.
Not correct Increase the size of the swap area
Wrong. Swap is backing store for memory pages and is not part of any filesystem's free space. Growing it does not give the mail spool or logs anywhere else to go.
Why
The point of splitting mount points is fault isolation: data that grows unpredictably should not share a filesystem with the data the system needs to keep functioning. Variable data — logs, mail spools, print queues, package caches, databases — lives under /var, so /var is the classic separate filesystem on a server. Also note that giving each of these areas its own filesystem is a tradeoff: space stranded in one filesystem cannot be borrowed by another unless the volumes are managed by LVM.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- LPI exam objective 102.1
- What it says
- Design a disk partitioning scheme, allocating filesystems and swap space to separate partitions or disks.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 102 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
- In LVM terminology, which object is created directly on a partition or whole disk so that its storage can be added to a pool? machine-checked
- You are laying out storage for a general-purpose Linux server. Which TWO of the following are genuine reasons to use LVM for the data filesystems rather than plain partitions? machine-checked
- Which file is the configuration file that GRUB 2 generates, and which administrators are told not to edit by hand on a typical Linux distribution? machine-checked
- You replaced the boot disk in a BIOS/MBR system and need to write the GRUB 2 boot loader into the master boot record of /dev/sda, installing the required GRUB modules under /boot. Which command does that? machine-checked
- On a GRUB 2 system whose configuration file is /boot/grub/grub.cfg, type the grub-mkconfig command — including the option and its argument — that regenerates that file. machine-checked
- A GRUB menu entry ends with the directives 'set root=(hd0,3)' followed by 'chainloader +1'. What is GRUB doing? machine-checked