I got into a discussion yesterday about partitions and Unix. Over the last year or so, the admin's have taken to installing just a / and /var. (one even didn't put in a /var but we fixed that one)

I'm very much of the thinking that you need:

/
/var
/<user/application>

at a minimum.

I'm not happy about users of machines being able to write to /

(users could be an application, such as oracle for example, I didn't really mean home accounts)

Having specified a Solaris build late last year, which was CHECK tested and only revealed 2 minor issues, and some of that specification related to disk partitions and security issues, I think I'm correct, and will enforce what I think.

But I'd be interested in other people's views on it before I throw my dummy out for people ignoring what I've put in a build documents.

 

Well I agree with you on that one. / is root's main directory if that fills up you loose your space there then the whole thing will crash. I can talk about this in an AIX way (IBM UNIX). From what I can gather all UNIX O/Ses use /, /var, /usr, /tmp. In theory users should only be able to read/write and maybe Xecute from his/her /home directory.
DBAs should really only have access to their files which lie usually in /usr/bin.