Advantages and Drawbacks of Different Partitioning Schemes
 

I understand that a denial of service attack can cause /tmp, /var, /usr/tmp, and /usr/var to "overflow" and fill up a hard drive. I've read that one way of dealing with this is to create separate /tmp and /var partitions, and then create ymbolic links for all the usr/tmp and usr/var directories to point to those.

Of course, being a newbie, I did not do this on my system.

1. To avoid needing to create partitions that limit the size of /tmp and /var, is there any way to simply set a limit on the size of all /tmp and /var partitions in the system?

2. If I install a new application, will it ever create a new /tmp or /var directory? The standards at pathnames.com seem to say that only creating a new user will create more /tmp and /var directories, but I want to make sure I understand that correctly.

3. Given that my system does not have separate /tmp and /var partitions, would it be easier to re-install it and specify those during the install, or to create those partitions, move all the files into them, and create the symbolic links? Which one is less likely to hose my system?

Thanks all for your help!