Partitions and disk space

[John M. Wright]

Steve,

You can probably achieve the effect you want without re-partitioning,
by creating some directories in /home or /usr (eg, /home/www), and
creating soft links to them in /var (eg, after copying your existing
/var/www to /usr/www, delete it from /var and create a soft link
/var/www that points to /home/www).  Not so elegant, perhaps, but
it's a reasonable way to effectively re-allocate disk space.

John Wright

 Dr. John M. Wright, Dept. of Chemistry & Biochemistry, M/S 0314, UCSD,
 La Jolla, CA 92093-0314; email: jwright at ucsd.edu; phone: 858-534-3049

On  Mon, 04 Oct 2004, "Steven J. Norton" <sjnorton at okno.com> typed:

 > Subject: Partitions and disk space
 > To: <yellowdog-general at lists.terrasoftsolutions.com>
 > 
 > Hello, all --
 > 
 > Here are some questions I've been meaning to ask for a while now: if you
 > check out the disk space report from LogWatch on my YDL web server
 > (reprinted below), you'll note that my /usr and /home partitions are quite
 > large and only sparsely used, while the /var partition (home to the content
 > files of my web server) is much smaller -- and already 17% full and
 > climbing. I had accepted the partition scheme suggested by the YDL installer
 > when this was set up.
 > 
 > So here goes:
 > 1) Is there a non-destructive way to change the size of existing partitions
 > (i.e. can I retrieve some space from, say, /home and give it to /var)?
 > 
 > 2) If so, which partitions that currently have extra space can be safely
 > made smaller? Since I'm not using this as my main computer, I am assuming
 > that /home does not need to be this big as there will not be too many user
 > files. What about /usr -- if I'm not installing a bunch of productivity
 > software, will this ever grow much?
 > 
 > [This is on an old beige G3 with a fresh 80 Gb hard drive and running YDL
 > 3.01, by the way.]
 > 
 > I know that I can tell Apache to look elsewhere on the disk for content
 > files, but I'd much rather keep everything inside /var/www/ for both
 > security and sanity reasons. Of course, this isn't really a problem yet, but
 > I've only just really started using the server and I want to head off
 > problems if I can. Any advice appreciated!
 > 
 >   -- Steve
 > 
 > ------------------ Disk Space --------------------
 > 
 > Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
 > /dev/hda14            496M  120M  350M  26% /
 > /dev/hda12             16G  146M   15G   1% /home
 > none                  187M     0  187M   0% /dev/shm
 > /dev/hda10             44G  1.6G   39G   4% /usr
 > /dev/hda13           1008M  155M  802M  17% /var
 > 
 >