Repartitioning drives

[alayaho]

Hi everyone,

I have a computer running UnixWare 7.1.1 with two 9GB SCSI HDD mirroring each other. The consultants who configured the machine partitioned the disk into 3 partitions:
/ 6GB
/var 2GB
swap 1GB

The problem is our application is running on the / partition and is nearly out of disk space. Is there any reason for having such a large /var and swap space? We have less than 100MB in /var and from the information I have seen, swap partitions do not need to be this large. We have 256 MB of RAM. Is there some way to tell how much swap space is actually being used?

Assuming that some space can be reclaimed from the /var and swap partitions, can the extra space be added to / without reinstallation or restoring from backup?


Thanks for your help!!!

 

[stanhubble]

"The problem is our application is running on the / partition " --> yes this is a bad thing in the first place.

"large /var" --> this is where log files tend to be put
"swap space" --> monitor with sar -r, rule of thumb is at least 2x real memory, more is better depending on users.

Do yourself a favor and buy a couple of new hard drives (18 gb are reasonably priced) mirror them and move your application on it so that it is not on your root filesystem.
faq219-2884

 

[apeasecpc]

I agree with stanhubble. It is much easier to add additional drives to a sco system than to repartition it.

 

[alayaho]

Thanks for your replies!

By the way, do you know why the partitions were set the way they were?

Is there any chance of reallocating the partitions and restoring the data from tape? Is it worth the effort or should I bit the bullet and fork out for new drives?


Thanks

 

[apeasecpc]

Sure you could redo the partitions and restore from tape, but it will be quicker to install a second hard drive.

One way to redo the partitions is to reinstall the sco software with different partitioning, and then restore from the tape backup.

If your tape backup has emergency recover options you may also be able to boot from the sco install diskette or cd and then repartition your drive from there before running the emergency recovery, but this all depends on how your tape recovery software works.

To reconfigure your existing drive you are probably talking about 8 hours of down time, depending on your system. To install a second hard drive you are probably looking at less than an hour of down time, most of which will be spent copying files directly from drive to drive. You may even be able to configure the mount point of the new drive's filesystem so that you don't have to reconfigure your application.