fthinker's questions

I can't decipher the deciding factor on where to place "variable program data" for an /opt installed package. On one hand the FHS says to place all variable data that dictates a program's state into /var/lib and that this data should stick around after a reboot. It also says this data is host specific. Now the FHS also says that the /var/opt directory should house opt "variable data". So.. lets just say I have installed a package and I have the option of setting its "working directory (this is how the package names this path)". Where should I put it?

For reference See:

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#VARLIBVARIABLESTATEINFORMATION http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#VAROPTVARIABLEDATAFOROPT

Note that this question naturally extends to /usr/local variable data as well.

Does anybody have a good solution for backing up /var on a live system?

All the recommendations I have seen so far have not taken into account the fact that /var holds live data and that restoring a file that was being simultaneously written to at the time it was captured is potentially disastrous. I wouldn't be caught dead backing up /var/lib/pgsql with a straight copy.

Usually when I install a common package like PostgreSQL or MySQL or Python etc using Yum it installs the files held within those packages into locations specific to CentOS itself. It may also install scripts specific to CentOS only. These paths may not be the same as the defaults found within the source distributions found on the PostgreSQL, MySQL, Python etc project websites and the scripts are usually unique to CentOS. Recently when I installed PostgreSQL under Ubuntu I found some very nice distribution specific information about how the install was organized and how to use the package in a Ubuntu way. I found this information in /usr/share/doc/

Is there any such information included within CentOS?