Re: making /var bigger

[Kent West]

Emma Jane Hogbin wrote:

Hey everyone:

I've got some unformatted disk space and I'd like to use it to make /var
bigger. This is my existing system:

htdig@debian:/$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 464M 27M 413M 7% /
/dev/hda3 4.6G 1.6G 2.8G 37% /home
/dev/hda5 2.3G 1.2G 1023M 55% /usr
/dev/hda6 464M 396M 44M 91% /var
/dev/hda7 2.8G 46M 2.6G 2% /usr/local
/dev/hda9 46M 60K 44M 1% /tmp

I also have a windows partition (or two) with approximately 8Gb available.
I was thinking of giving /var 2.6Gb total (adding 2Gb). This is a laptop so the log files
aren't critical for anything fun like web servers. I don't leave my mail
in /var/mail (I move it over to my home directory). I'm currently running
Woody (unstable).

1. What do I need to do before I add the extra disk space? I can throw the
entire current partition onto a cdrom as a backup. Is there anything else
I need to do?

Backup is always a good idea.
I'd boot into single-user mode to do the actual change-over.

2. How do I actually resize a partition? Is "parted" a good package?
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/parted.html

I've never use parted; resizing Windows partitions depends on the file system (FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, etc). If it's FAT16/32, I've used fips (booting off a DOS floppy to run it).

You can either "add" the 2GB to your existing /var partition, by mounting some subdirectory under /var onto the new partition, or you can create a new 2.6GB partition, initialize the new partition (mkfs /dev/hda2), mount that partition (mount /dev/hda2 /mnt) and then move the data from your existing /var to the new var (cp -a /var/* /mnt), then umount both partitions, re-mount the new partition on /var (mount /dev/hda2 /var), and make the appropriate changes to /etc/fstab. This second method will leave an unused 464MB partition in the middle of your drive though; however, with some more shuffling, you could add it to your existing /usr partition, or use it as a spare partition of some sort, perhaps for compiling your programs.

Perhaps parted makes all of this much simpler than I've been doing; I just don't know.

3. Without meaning to start a huge debate, is my current space allocation
ok? I'm using my laptop as a development box. It has apache, mysql, open
office, a bunch of browsers and vim.

Seems okay to me.

Really, what else does a girl need?
;)

Drool - a geek girl - ga-a-ah drool slobber

thanks!

emma :)

And I've always liked the name Emma, ever since Emma Sams was in the BigTime.

Kent



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