/var running out of space

[ogautherot at freesurf.fr]

Hi Vonleigh!

> 	I think that this /var is way too small, considering that 20 mail
> users with 10MB of email each, would be 200MB and could easily saturate
>  it.
>
> 	I'm wondering what would be the best way of going about this. My
> initial thought was to just link /var/mail to /home/mail and that way
> let it grow however it needs to. However, maybe setting /var/mail to
> it's own partition might be advantageous, although I don't know if this
>  requires reformatting the whole HD.

If you move your mail directory to /home, make sure it ends up on the /usr
partition rather then / (the default location of /home is on /).

Another option is to "growfs" the /var partition: it is a utility that
resizes the partitions nearly live. Since resizing is only possible while
the partitions are umounted, make sure you do that during boot (option 4
of the BSD boot manager, that stops after fsck). You can also use growfs
to reserve some space for an additional label within the slice (i.e.
partition), which you could assign to /var/mail.

> 	I don't have access to the server (I'm renting it in a facility),
so
> reformatting is not an option, it's also on a mirrored RAID if that
> changes anything.

Good point: does growfs work on RAID-based partitions?

Hope it helps
  Olivier