swapless in Toronto

[Fraser Campbell]

On Monday 07 February 2005 12:38, David J Patrick wrote:

> le box ! What's the sane way to resize my home partition ? I've poked

IMO, the best way is to use LVM ;-)

Probably you could backup /home to other partitions where there is space, 
resize /home partition (fdisk) and then create a swap partition in the newly 
freed space.  Format the new /home and swap, restore, continue ... there 
might be tools that automate this (partition magic I expect, and I'm sure 
some free stuff).

For future iterations I would suggest that you use LVM partitions.  My home 
system looks like this:

  /dev/mapper/vg0-root      960M  184M  726M  21% /
  /dev/md0                            118M   25M   88M  22% /boot
  /dev/mapper/vg0-home      15G   12G  3.8G  75% /home
  /dev/mapper/vg0-tmp       960M   82M  827M  10% /tmp
  /dev/mapper/vg0-usr          5.0G  4.0G  789M  84% /usr
  /dev/mapper/vg0-var           30G   19G  9.5G  67% /var
  /dev/mapper/vg0-backups  30G   19G  9.3G  68% /var/backups
  /dev/mapper/vg0-opt        496M  280M  192M  60% /opt

Start with logical volumes at the size you expect to use (not significantly 
larger) then grow the LVs as you need to.  Eventually I expect 
my /var/backups partition will grow beyond 30G at which time all I'll need to 
do is:

- umount /var/backups
- fsck /dev/vg0/backups
- lvresize -L50G /dev/vg0/backups
- resize2fs /dev/vg0/backups
- mount /var/backups

Reiserfs supposedly supports online resizing (anyone tried it?), had I used 
that (supposedly) I could resize my filesystem without even unmounting.  My 
swap is also a logical volume so if I wanted more swap I could follow the 
same procedure (swapoff, lvresize, mkswap, swapon) or just create a second 
swap LV.

I don't see myself running out of space for quite a while, my volume group has 
28GB unallocated, when I eventually use that up I have another 40GB of RAIDed 
space that I can add to the volume group ... all of that space can be tacked 
onto the logical volumes that need it, trivially.   My point is that it's 
good leave extra space unallocated until you find out where you need it ... 
often some time long after install.

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada                               Debian GNU/Linux
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