Re: Put /usr on a different drive
On Sun, Jan 14, 2007 at 10:46:48AM +0100, Daniel A. wrote: On 1/14/07, Jerry McAllister [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, Jan 14, 2007 at 12:08:13AM +0100, Daniel A. wrote: Hi, I'm wondering if someone could point me in the right direction of moving the entire /usr partition to a second hard disk, given that I am on an existing (newly installed) install of FreeBSD. Also, is it possible to specify something like this during the installation itself? It is quite possible, but not quite as convenient as it could be if you are not familiar with the installer. ... much excised ... /dev/ad1s1a /usrufs rw 2 2 Then reboot and things should be just hunkie-dori. jerry Sincerely, Daniel A. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] That sounds absolutely fantastic! I did think over just copying the contents and then mounting the drive as /usr, but I was unsure if doing it so simple would break something. Apparently it wont, if I just do it in single-user mode? Well, as long as you do it right. Anyway, now that I've got that settled, would anyone recommend me what to do with the now empty space in ad0? What do you want to do with it? First of all, I can't believe you can't get by with 55GB in /usr. You must have stuff in there I would never put there, so take a look at what is using up all that space first before you start moving it around. Then, I would just mount that space previously used for /usr as something else like /work or /scratch, empty it out and use it for stashing stuff there like all pictures you take in a lifetime or something like that. My current layout is like this: ad0 - 60GB 1gb swap 520M / 520M /tmp 55G /usr 1.5G /var ad1 - 120GB (Currently only one partition, occupying full drive) Once I move my /usr to ad1, I'll have 55 gigabytes of space available on ad0, and nowhere to put it. I've thought of assigning that space to /var, but 55G would be overkill for a little home server like mine, don't you think? You don't have to put it anywhere. It is already there. Just make up a mount point - which is just a directory and is done with mkdir as in 'mkdir /work' or 'mkdir /scratch' or 'mkdir /pics' or 'mkdir /web' or whatever you want. Then mount the partition that had previously mounted as /usr maybe it was /dev/ad0s1e on that new mount point. It sort of looks like you must have put home directories for user accounts in /usr and I would suggest putting them in a filesystem just for them. So, maybe you want to mount it as /home and put user accounts there.Depends on how many you have, probably. Although, once upon a time /usr was thought to be a place for user accounts - maybe /usr/home actually, nowdays /usr is too important to the system itself to put user accounts' home directories, which can grow unexpectedly sometimes in it, unless you are the only one with any user accounts, and then you can even surprise yourself sometimes. Maybe I should just assign ad1 to /home, which is basically the one place where I use most disk space? Oh snap, never mind answering this email. I think that is exactly what I'll do! OK. Well, that is what I have been saying, somewhat. Don't make it ad1, but ad1s1a. I would suggest fully slicing and partitioning it (fdisk and bsdlabel) rather than using it as the so-called dangerously-dedicated disk (eg newfs-ing and mounting it as just ad1. And thanks for the replies, Jerry and Andrew. jerry -- Sincerely, Daniel A. A. dienub.org ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Put /usr on a different drive
On 1/14/07, Jerry McAllister [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, Jan 14, 2007 at 12:08:13AM +0100, Daniel A. wrote: Hi, I'm wondering if someone could point me in the right direction of moving the entire /usr partition to a second hard disk, given that I am on an existing (newly installed) install of FreeBSD. Also, is it possible to specify something like this during the installation itself? It is quite possible, but not quite as convenient as it could be if you are not familiar with the installer. Any possible google queries, links, articles, et cetera are warmly welcomed. I've tried throwing a few keywords at google, but it all returns off topic pages. In the last six months I have posted fairly complete ways of doing this several times on this list. It is easy. I suggest you look throught the FreeBSD questions archives. Most of my posts assume things are being moved to an existing file system, but the process is the same. First, you should look at what is using up space in your /usr filesystem. It may be that something is growing in a way you do no want. For that, use the 'du' command something like: cd /usr du -sk * Cd in to any directory that seems unreasonable and repeat the du to narrow things down. One thing that is often done, but I don't recommend is putting user accounts and other things that can grow unexpectedly in to /usr. I make a separate file system for user accounts, generally using the /home mount point. I also put /usr/ports in a different file system. If you finally decide that you do need to add a disk - a very real possibility - then choose a good quality drive of the same general type your already have - SCSI, IDE/SATA, SAS - aind physicaly install it. Boot the machine and look for in dmesg. It will either show up as dann or adnn where nn is a device number. It will be da for SCSI or ad for IDE family. The first drive will be 0 the second will be 1, etc.Probably your boot drive is 0 and the one you add will be 1. If they are IDE then ad0 and ad1. Next, take a look at the drive with fdisk. Presuming it is ad1, do: fdisk ad1 It should find the disk and think everything is in slice 1 unless the disk was formerly used in a different system, in which case it should see the disk, but stuff may be spread ofer up to 4 slices (occasionally miscalled partitions). My examples the new drive is IDE family and is the second disk. You can make sure everything that might be left on it is effectively wiped out by doing: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad1 bs=512 count=65 Then, to make the disk usable you need to do an fdisk, bsdlabel and newfs. Presuming you will use the whole disk for /usr (maybe you will really want to use it in a more complex way, but the process is essentially the same) and presuming you don't want to make the drive bootable - and install an OS on it in a separate root, then The fdisk creates the slice table and writes sector 0. fdisk -I ad1 writes one single slice containing all the usable space on the drive. NOTE, although drives are numbered 0-nn, slices are numbered 1-4. Then you need to create a label in slice 1 bsdlabel -w ad1s1 creates the initial label - note the additional 's1' to specify the slice. Now, divide up the slice in to partitions. In this I am presuming you want a single large partition. Use the bsdlabel in edit mode. bsdlabel -e ad1s1 You will be put in a vi edit session unless you have a different default editor specified in an environment variable. That will bring up a screen with the slice label as it currently is. Ignore all the stuff specifying drive specs. For one partition, change only one field. There should be a line starting with 'a:' Change it so it looks like: a:*04.2BSD 2048 16384 32776 Leave the line that starts 'c:' as is. But, if it doesn't give you an 'a:' line, copy the 'c:' line and use it and just replace the size field with the '*' You don't really need to change the fsize, bsize and bps fields, but suggest you make them as I have them above. Then you have to create a file system on that partition. Do that with newfs. newfs /dev/ad1s1a Newfs needs the full device spec as above. now you can mount and write to the filesystem. I'd suggest you do this next stuff in single user mode, but it isn't absolutely essential. Make a temporary mount point and mount it. mkdir /newusr mount /dev/ad1s1a /newusr Copy the existing /usr to the new space, probably using tar I use an interim file, but you can use pipes. If your current /usr is really a whole partition in and of itself, then I would use dump/restore instead of tar for this cd /usr tar cvpf /newusr/usr.tar * cd /newusr tar xvpf usr.tar The 'v' flag is not essential, but gives you the confidence something is happening. Using dump/restore instead of tar, do: cd /newusr dump 0af - | restore -rf - Now, get rid of the old /usr and make it use the new one. cd / mv usr oldusr umount /newusr
Put /usr on a different drive
Hi, I'm wondering if someone could point me in the right direction of moving the entire /usr partition to a second hard disk, given that I am on an existing (newly installed) install of FreeBSD. Also, is it possible to specify something like this during the installation itself? Any possible google queries, links, articles, et cetera are warmly welcomed. I've tried throwing a few keywords at google, but it all returns off topic pages. Sincerely, Daniel A. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Put /usr on a different drive
On 1/14/07, Daniel A. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, I'm wondering if someone could point me in the right direction of moving the entire /usr partition to a second hard disk, given that I am on an existing (newly installed) install of FreeBSD. First, you need to copy all the stuff over. You can use dump(8)/restore(8), or mount /usr read-only, new /usr read-write (under a temporary mount point like /mnt) and use tar(1), cpio(1L), or cp(1). Then it's just a matter of unmounting /usr and mounting your new device under this mount point. Don't forget to edit the fstab(5) entry. Also, is it possible to specify something like this during the installation itself? Just partition your second drive and define any mount point on any of it's partitions - everything will be fine. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Put /usr on a different drive
On Sun, Jan 14, 2007 at 12:08:13AM +0100, Daniel A. wrote: Hi, I'm wondering if someone could point me in the right direction of moving the entire /usr partition to a second hard disk, given that I am on an existing (newly installed) install of FreeBSD. Also, is it possible to specify something like this during the installation itself? It is quite possible, but not quite as convenient as it could be if you are not familiar with the installer. Any possible google queries, links, articles, et cetera are warmly welcomed. I've tried throwing a few keywords at google, but it all returns off topic pages. In the last six months I have posted fairly complete ways of doing this several times on this list. It is easy. I suggest you look throught the FreeBSD questions archives. Most of my posts assume things are being moved to an existing file system, but the process is the same. First, you should look at what is using up space in your /usr filesystem. It may be that something is growing in a way you do no want. For that, use the 'du' command something like: cd /usr du -sk * Cd in to any directory that seems unreasonable and repeat the du to narrow things down. One thing that is often done, but I don't recommend is putting user accounts and other things that can grow unexpectedly in to /usr. I make a separate file system for user accounts, generally using the /home mount point. I also put /usr/ports in a different file system. If you finally decide that you do need to add a disk - a very real possibility - then choose a good quality drive of the same general type your already have - SCSI, IDE/SATA, SAS - aind physicaly install it. Boot the machine and look for in dmesg. It will either show up as dann or adnn where nn is a device number. It will be da for SCSI or ad for IDE family. The first drive will be 0 the second will be 1, etc.Probably your boot drive is 0 and the one you add will be 1. If they are IDE then ad0 and ad1. Next, take a look at the drive with fdisk. Presuming it is ad1, do: fdisk ad1 It should find the disk and think everything is in slice 1 unless the disk was formerly used in a different system, in which case it should see the disk, but stuff may be spread ofer up to 4 slices (occasionally miscalled partitions). My examples the new drive is IDE family and is the second disk. You can make sure everything that might be left on it is effectively wiped out by doing: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad1 bs=512 count=65 Then, to make the disk usable you need to do an fdisk, bsdlabel and newfs. Presuming you will use the whole disk for /usr (maybe you will really want to use it in a more complex way, but the process is essentially the same) and presuming you don't want to make the drive bootable - and install an OS on it in a separate root, then The fdisk creates the slice table and writes sector 0. fdisk -I ad1 writes one single slice containing all the usable space on the drive. NOTE, although drives are numbered 0-nn, slices are numbered 1-4. Then you need to create a label in slice 1 bsdlabel -w ad1s1 creates the initial label - note the additional 's1' to specify the slice. Now, divide up the slice in to partitions. In this I am presuming you want a single large partition. Use the bsdlabel in edit mode. bsdlabel -e ad1s1 You will be put in a vi edit session unless you have a different default editor specified in an environment variable. That will bring up a screen with the slice label as it currently is. Ignore all the stuff specifying drive specs. For one partition, change only one field. There should be a line starting with 'a:' Change it so it looks like: a:*04.2BSD 2048 16384 32776 Leave the line that starts 'c:' as is. But, if it doesn't give you an 'a:' line, copy the 'c:' line and use it and just replace the size field with the '*' You don't really need to change the fsize, bsize and bps fields, but suggest you make them as I have them above. Then you have to create a file system on that partition. Do that with newfs. newfs /dev/ad1s1a Newfs needs the full device spec as above. now you can mount and write to the filesystem. I'd suggest you do this next stuff in single user mode, but it isn't absolutely essential. Make a temporary mount point and mount it. mkdir /newusr mount /dev/ad1s1a /newusr Copy the existing /usr to the new space, probably using tar I use an interim file, but you can use pipes. If your current /usr is really a whole partition in and of itself, then I would use dump/restore instead of tar for this cd /usr tar cvpf /newusr/usr.tar * cd /newusr tar xvpf usr.tar The 'v' flag is not essential, but gives you the confidence something is happening. Using dump/restore instead of tar, do: cd /newusr dump 0af - | restore -rf - Now, get rid of the old /usr and make it use the new one. cd / mv usr oldusr umount /newusr mount /dev/ad1s1a /usr Check everything out and
