Extending a filesystem on Linux

[Raynald Boucher]

Good day all,

I have installed Mandrake 9.2 and created several filesystems of 800MB each.

/usr quickly filled up eventhough I loaded a minimal system. I'm now trying to install Samba 3.0 and the "make" fails because the filesystem is full.

Is there any way in Linux to extend a filesystem (somewhat like extenfs)?
Any particular restrictions?

This is a trial run so I will eventualy reinstall.

Thanks

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

You can extend a filesystem with cfdisk

You can extend it with the system manager linuxconf GUI that comes with Mandrake.

If you have LVM installed you can use those commands as well, so long as you don't use mirroring.

I would recommend trying them all, with printed procedures and keep trying until you are good at it.

One of my Linux weaknesses is in this area. I got around it by overplanning my disk capacity so that I have not had to make a filesystem change in the two years I've been using Linux for webhosting.

SEP

[Ratzie]

lvm logical volume manger will handle that.
It allows you to extend your partition over multiple drives.

[Mark Grant]

Personally, I would suggest that /usr/local should be a seperate filesystem for those that compile their own software. Preferably a reiserfs one in a logical volume.

You could build the software somewhere else though. I image ./configure --prefix=/a/bigchunk/of space works for samba though I haven't built that in years so I could be wrong.

[Lee Thian Sin]

hi,

when u install linux, did you chose the lvm to install? if yes, you can do an online increase on your logical volume. for filesystem, ext3 with journaling is able to do online extends. hope this help if you reinstall your system.