At 11:58 PM 1/26/00 -0500, Liz Dunbar wrote:
>I added a (gift) 20GB 2nd disk because the first (1.xx GB, as I recall -
>it's been snowing) is 83% full and filling with rapidly growing website and
>mail use. My totally untutored idea was to move the website to the larger
>disk, leaving mail on the first, and keep encouraging the website to grow
>apace in peace. Is this going to work?
Yes. The easiest way is probably to do the following:
-- make a suitably sized partition on the new drive (more
on this later) and put an ext2 filesystem on it
-- mount the new partition at some temporary mount point
-- cp the existing Website tree, from DocumentRoot on down,
to the new partition
-- remount the new partition at the old DocumentRoot location
Once you've verified that the new version of the Website is good, you can
delete the old one.
This approach will work for the main portion of the Web site. If you allow
your users to set up personal Web directories (using the
/home/userid/public_html convention, for example), that will be more
complicated. There are fancy solutions, but in your case, it might just be
easier to move /home following the same procedure I outlined above for the
Web DocumentRoot.
>Since I blew my first attempt at partitioning the new drive, before I try
>again - what size partitions and how many should I make to effectively use
>this humongous disk and comfortably hold this website?
This is the kind of thing that knowledgeable people argue about, so don't
trust anyone's opinions (not even mine) completely -- think through how
whatever people say applies to your situation.
If everything now fits on a 1-gig drive, you can't have a very big Website
yet. So a 2-gig partition would be ample for it, at least while you are
figuring things out. And remember that a partitioning decision isn't
irrevocable -- you can always repartition any capacity that is not in use.
So in your situation, I think I'd do something like this:
hdb1 - small, about 50 mB. This is just in reserve, in case
you ever want to make this a boot drive. If you do,
it will be your /boot filesystem. This needs to be
the first partition on the disk (to accommodate the
1024-cylinder limitation on boot partitions).
hdb2 - 2 gigs. Use it now for the Web stuff.
hdb3 - 2 gigs. Use it now for /home
hdb4 - an extended partition sized at the remainder of the
disk.
hdb5-? -- these will be logical partitions, and you will
make them later, as you discover the needs of the
site.
>And will somebody please tell me what books to buy so I can quit bugging
>you guys - or at least ask the right questions!
Book publishing schedules run enough slower than Linux distribution releases
that almost everything in print is out of date. I don't think I own ANY
Linux books I actually use (except books on programming, which you don't
need at this stage).
Better is to become familiar with the core sources of online information.
Take a look at these:
-- Linux Documentation Project (http://www.linuxdoc.org) - html
versions of HowTos, mini-HowTos, and other Linux
reference documents.
-- Linux Gazette (http://www.linuxgazette.com/) - online
Linux "magazine'
-- Linux Distributions List (http://kernelnotes.org/dist-index.html) -
there are others, but I find this the handiest place for
keeping up on new Linux releases.
-- the Linux Newbie FAQ - it's gotten a bit bloated (surely
ALL those questions areen't *frequently* asked, even
if they once were), but it's still very useful - at
(http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs/html/index.html)
-- an article on setting up a Linux-based server - at
(http://www.networkcomputing.com/
unixworld/tutorial/013/013.part1.html - put it
back on one line).
Also consider subscribing to one of the print journals, Linux Journal
(www.linuxjournal.com) or Linux Magazine (I think www.linuxmagazine.com).
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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