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Re: [LUG] Modifying size of /var partition

 

On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 04:21:06PM +0100, Philip Radford wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Just wondering if someone could help me out with this predicament.
> 
> I currently have a very small /var partition which is filling up daily with log 
> files. Over the weekend the capacity figure stated 107% which I have now fixed by 
> moving some files out.
> 
> Filesystem        1K-blocks    Used       Avail        Capacity    Mounted on
> /dev/twed0s1d    253678        60068     173316     26%          /var
> 
> Can anyone offer guidance on if it is possible to increase the size of this 
> parittion easily without causing harm.

If you have unused space on your hard drive, you could, otherwise it's
not an easy task (but not too hard either)

> I have to admit that I do not fully understand the figures above in order to 
> convert these into actual k/b or m/b figures.
> Is this 25M or 25,000 bytes??

253,678 * 1024, or 259,766,272 bytes (arround 250MB)

You could try "df -h", if your system has a modern version of GNU df on
it, it will print out values in human readable form (as will other
commands like "ls")

> I tried the /etc/fstab file but there is no reference to actual sizes only 
> locations and type of file system.
> 
> This is on a FreeBSD 5.3 box.

Never used FreeBSD. 

The easiest way is use spare space on your disk to create a new /var
partition, copy the files across, and alter fstab. Otherwise you'd have
to look at your /var partition, find a large sub-directory, and move
that onto another patition (via a symlink, or by mounting a partition)

I have a 9GB /var partition on my myth box:
/dev/hda3             9.2G  4.7G  4.1G  54% /var

Made up of
sudo du --max-depth=1 -h
48K     ./lost+found
133M    ./lib
1.6G    ./cache
3.8M    ./backups
4.0K    ./local
12K     ./lock
333M    ./log
188K    ./run
116K    ./spool
3.5M    ./tmp
4.0K    ./opt
9.9M    ./mail
8.0K    ./autofs
2.7G    ./www
4.7G    .

If I did run out of space on this partition, I could buy a new hard
drive, add it into the machine, and mount it as /var/www (after moving
my website off). I could also move the website to my home partition
/dev/hda5              80G   65G   11G  86% /home

By creating /home/iso/www, and copying the files over. I'd then create a
symlink at /var/www pointing to /home/iso/www.

The other option is partition resizing using parted 
# apt-cache search parted
parted - The GNU Parted disk partition resizing program
gparted - GNOME partition editor

But I can't advise on that. Again you'll need space elsewhere on the
disk that you can plunder for your larger /var partition.

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