Partion woes

[sourceninja]

Ok, so I'm an idiot.

I setup a new box a little while ago and set it up with the following partitions

50megs /boot (ext2)
2 gigs swap
20 gig / (reiserfs)
rest of the drive /home (reiserfs)

Now I'm finding i'm about 80% full on my / drive. I need to get some more space onto that partition. Now I have a few options, but i'm not sure which is the best. All of these will solve my problem.

1) The biggest apps I have installed are UT2004 and NWN in my /opt folder. I could uninstall those games and install them in my home drive. This would free up a few gig. (annoying because then portage can't manage my updates for me)

2) I could get a new drive, partition it and copy over my old drive with cp -a. (expensive gonna cost a little to get another dirve, but I would then have another 300-400 gig)

3) I could do a bind mount (mount --bind /home/games /opt) to mount /opt to a folder on my home drive (I could also do this with other folders like /usr/portage/distfiles or anything else that gets large. I already do this with /root in my fstab, but thats just to make sure the root user files get backed up with my other user /home files. (This might work out great for a while, but i'm concerned about access times doing this. Will this cause any issues?)

4) Do a backup of my system, repartition the drive and restore the backup (just really freaking time comsuming)

Anways, what do you think the best solution is?

 

[Nothinman]

1) The biggest apps I have installed are UT2004 and NWN in my /opt folder. I could uninstall those games and install them in my home drive. This would free up a few gig. (annoying because then portage can't manage my updates for me)

If portage requires them to be in /opt, you could always just create symlinks to the old locations.

3) I could do a bind mount (mount --bind /home/games /opt) to mount /opt to a folder on my home drive (I could also do this with other folders like /usr/portage/distfiles or anything else that gets large. I already do this with /root in my fstab, but thats just to make sure the root user files get backed up with my other user /home files. (This might work out great for a while, but i'm concerned about access times doing this. Will this cause any issues?)

bind mounting /root seems dumb since /root won't be available if you boot single user to fix /home. You realize that you can specify multiple directories to be backed up with tools like tar, right?

Anways, what do you think the best solution is?

Find out why you have 20G used on root, I don't know how big UT2K4 and NWN are but I can't imagine the two of them total more than 6G so that still leaves 10G of "something" on your root filesystem. On my notebook here I have 7G used and ~1G of that is for /var/cache/apt/archives, having 10G of stuff that you can't delete that's not personal data seems odd to me.

 

[bersl2]

Reiserfs can grow or shrink IIRC. Try GParted or QTParted, because doing it manually is probably not a good idea.

 

[n0cmonkey]

1. Get another drive.
2. Stop using /opt.
3. Partition better next time.

 

[Nothinman]

Reiserfs can grow or shrink IIRC.

Reiserfs can't grow or shrink itself, but yes there are tools to do that. But I don't believe it can be done online.

Try GParted or QTParted, because doing it manually is probably not a good idea.

They'll save you some of the calculations, but doing it with fdisk and resize_reiserfs isn't terribly hard.

 

[sourceninja]

reiser can grow or shrink as long as you dont move the start position of the partition. Which I would need to do to /home.

I have been looking into what is taking up so much room, nwn, and UT2k4 are about 7 gigs.

/dev/sda3 20G 14G 6.0G 69% /
/dev/sda1 54M 5.6M 45M 11% /boot
/dev/sda4 259G 24G 236G 10% /home

thats the important part of my df -h output. After cleanup. Remember this is a desktop OS with gnome installed and all the normal stuff (mplayer, firefox, thunderbird, bittorrent, etc)

I was wrong nwn is 3.6 gig and UT2004 is almost 7.6 gig. Man those are some huge games. Thats 11 gig right there out of my 20.

 

[Nothinman]

thats the important part of my df -h output. After cleanup. Remember this is a desktop OS with gnome installed and all the normal stuff (mplayer, firefox, thunderbird, bittorrent, etc)

I have a similar setup, except mine's Debian sid. And I have ~12G used on / of which ~4G is /var/cache/apt/archives and another ~4G is /usr/src (all kernel sources and some patches) so that leaves ~4G for normal packages. I can't understand how you can have 7G of packages unless it's just the wasted space from Gentoo requiring all of those development files.

 

[sourceninja]

well all the development files (except for kenerl source /headers) are deleted. They are all stored in /usr/portage/distfiles which is now empty. You dont have to keep them on your machine if you dont mind downloading them again when you need to upgrade. In the past I've actually kept them on a networked server instead of just deleting them. I'm thinking the problem might be my CFLAGS. I have march=k8 -pipe -02. I think if I change that to March=k8 -pipe -0s I will get some space back. I'm still hunting for un-needed/wasted packages/cruft, but I think i'm just going to back the whole thing up and repartition.

 

[Nothinman]

I'm thinking the problem might be my CFLAGS. I have march=k8 -pipe -02. I think if I change that to March=k8 -pipe -0s I will get some space back.

It won't save you much and you'll have to recompile every single binary on your system.

 

[sourceninja]

Well the compile times dont bother me. I set the niceness level of portage and my system is still useable though the whole thing. But if the savings is so small to not matter then why waste the time. I think i'm just going to backup the system and repartition. I'm realizing I need more space then I think as I still have a few more multi-gig programs I want to mess around with.

I'm also toying with the idea of just backing up /home and doing a 64bit install instead. I've wanted to give it a more serious try for a while, but i've been lazy.

 

[Nothinman]

As a test I just recompiled coreutils on my Debian system and the ls binary is a whole 8K smaller. And most of the other binaries (chgrp, chown, chmod, du, md5sum, etc) were still the exact same size.

 

[sourceninja]

I think I'm going to just re-install the whole system. I've been reading about 64bit today intead of working and it looks like all the problems I had with 64bit gentoo have been worked out so far. So I'm just going to take the plunge. I think I will still specify -0s, I dont see much of a downside to it from -02.

So what do you think, just be safe and go with 50meg on /boot 2 gig swap and the rest of the drive for / or break it up again? if I do decide to break it up again I think I may not use reiser for /home, that way I can resize home without much trouble if this happens again.

 

[Nothinman]

50M for /boot is rather large, I currently have 5 kernels nearly all with a corresponding initrd and map files and they're only taking up ~17M.

And I would recommend against reiserfs anyway, the resize limitations are pretty minor next to the fact that the fs and it's userland tools are crap. Of course I would also recommend against Gentoo, but I doubt that would make a difference here =)

 

[sourceninja]

Yea, 50m is rather large, but thats what the guide recomended for amd64. I'll probably scale it back. I'm a fan of ubuntu/debain but I just find myself more comfortable with gentoo. Would you recomend any other fs then ext2/3? I've not had much exp in anything but ext2/ext3 and reiserfs.

 

[Nothinman]

Personally I use XFS or ext3 whenever possible. XFS won't be any nicer in the resize arena, but IMO it's a much more stable filesystem and the userland tools are lightyears ahead of anything Reiser has produced.