Re: redimensioning /usr

From: Lew Pitcher (lpitcher_at_sympatico.ca)
Date: 07/06/04 

Date: Mon, 05 Jul 2004 22:06:07 -0400

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Michael Black wrote:
> Lew Pitcher (Lew.Pitcher@td.com) writes:
>
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>>Patrick Drouin wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Hello everyone,
>>>
>>>/usr has grown too small on my system. I have a large swap partition that
>>>sits at the end of the drive that I could make smaller. If I delete my swap
>>>file, is there any way I can safely redimension my /usr without zapping the
>>>data on it?
>>
>>In essence, no.
>>
>>
>>>id then recreate the awap file at the end of the drive when I'm
>>>done...
>>>
>>>Any suggestions as far as process and tools are more than welcome.
>>
>>Take some spare disk space, and build a Linux fs partition in it
>>
>>Mount the new partition, and copy a branch of the /usr fs tree to it (say
>>/usr/local)
>>
>>rm -rf the branch just copied, then mkdir an empty branch
>>(rm -rf /usr/local ; mkdir /usr/local )
>>
>>unmount the partition, remount it in place of the branch
>>(umount ... ; mount ... /usr/local)
>>
>>adjust your fstab to show the new mount
>>
>>
>
> And isn't this the case for not allocating all your hard disk space
> when you do an install?

Yes. I've considered /not/ partitioning, but I determined that a partitioned
setup had more advantages than a 'flat' setup.

With partitioning, you can reserve space for future use, and limit space where
it makes sense to. You position yourself for reasonable backups, and
reasonable filesystem check times (imagine the time it would take to fsck a
160Gb flat space at startup 8-S ). You seperate critical subtrees from
disposable ones, optimize filesystems to match data (do you /really/ need a
journalling fs for the /tmp filesystem? I think not). You can impose security
restrictions (read-only mounts, or no-exec mounts) on subtrees.

And you can do none of that with a flat filesystem space.

[good words snipped]

- --
Lew Pitcher

Master Codewright & JOAT-in-training | GPG public key available on request
Registered Linux User #112576 (http://counter.li.org/)
Slackware - Because I know what I'm doing.
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