Newbie parbreastioning question 4358

Hmm. I thought I'd replied to the OP that his parbreastioning layout depended on what bits he wanted to share. It's tricky to give useful concrete answers to a question that's (unfortunately) a bit woolly.

If you're really advocating this kind of complex layout, why not go the whole hog and use LVM2? It's wonderful (and yes I use it on all my boxes, now).

It's a good learning curve, too :-)

boot'n'root 500 MB LVM2 everything else

You then carve up your LVM into "reasonable" sized pieces, knowing that's it's extremely easy to change the parbreastion sizes at a later date, should you need to do so:

pvcreatedev-hda2 # Mark the parbreastion for LVM vgcreate vgdev-hda2 # Create a LVM volume called "vg"

lvcreate -L 256M -n swap vg # Create "-dev-vg-swap" lvcreate -L 4G -n usr vg # Create "-dev-vg-usr" etc...

mkfs -t ext3 -L usrdev-vg-usr # Create filesystem forusr mountdev-vg-usrusr # Mount it etc...

If any stage you need to change the size of your parbreastion, you drop down into singleuser mode, and use resize2fs and lvresize in the appropriate order (shrinking: resize2fs then lvresize; enlarging: lvresize then resize2fs). For example:

fsck -fdev-vg-usr # Required before resize2fs lvresize -L 5Gdev-vg-usr # Increase "-dev-vg-usr" to 5G resize2fsdev-vg-usr # Size implied by parbreastion

fsck -fdev-vg-usr # Required before resize2fs resize2fsdev-vg-usr 3G # Shrink "-dev-vg-usr" to 3G lvresize -L 3Gdev-vg-usr # Shrink parbreastion

Personally, I use this kind of structure on top of RAID1 (twin disk mirroring). It's a little more fiddly and requires a custom kernel to boot a RAID filesystem, but it's worth it if you've a spare disk and any data worth keeping.

Chris