[ale] Basic configuration advice needed.

[Quinton McCombs]

Although I am not new to Unix, I am new to the administration side of a 
Unix box.  I was wondering if I could get some help on partitioning with 
Linux (RedHat 5.2 to be specific).

I have seen that on most Unix systems, the admin will mount the /var, /etc, 
/, and perhaps a few others in separate partitions even though they all 
reside on the same physical drive.  Is this only to prevent file sizes in 
/var (for example) from filling up the root file system?   Or is this also 
done for performance reasons?