[ILUG] nuking /var and giving it to /usr

[Niall O Broin]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2002 at 12:13:34PM -0500, Conor_D_Wynne at Dell.com wrote:


A heap of stuff that was hard to read because of tabs and spaces but I got
the point :-) 

> Its basically one mega logical drive with partitions on it.
> What I wan't to do is donate /var's ridiculous amount of space to /usr as
> /usr is pretty full.
> 
> Whats the best way of going about this?

You haven't used lvm so there's no easy way. I'd identify some parts of /usr
which are quite large and use the partition for that. Procedure would be

1) bring the box to single user mode - init 1
2) mkdir /newvar
3) cp -a /var/* /newvar
4) umount /var
5) rmdir /var
6) mv /newvar /var
7) mkdir /usr2 (or whatever)
8) Edit /etc/fstab, changing /var to /usr2
9) init 6

Now the box is booted up with the old /var partition on /usr2. You can
remove the contents of /usr2 (because you copied them to the /newvar (now
called /var) directory). Now you can copy some large subdirs of /usr (maybe
X11R6 or local) to /usr2 and remove them from /usr, replacing them by
symlinks to the new directories in /usr2.

This is not a perfect solution but it's probably as good as you're going to
get without backing up the box and repartitioning in a slightly less
braindead way. (I've long been an advocate of the one big root theory of SA,
with certain exceptions such as big /var for some kinds of server, and often
/home elsewhere but otherwise - one big root is the way to go IMNSHO.



Niall