What am I doing wrong with MOUNT?

[John Murphy]

"Gerald Lightsey" <glightsey1 at cox.net> wrote:

>What am I doing wrong or what don't I understand about a drive being mounted
>on /var where data is being written underneath it to the original
>/var/db/mysql/mydatabasename on disk  0 rather than onto the mounted disk 1?

First I must say that you should ask questions of a technical nature
at FreeBSD-Questions at FreeBSD.ORG

Read the FreeBSD-Newbies First Aid Kit at
http://people.freebsd.org/~sue/newbies/fak.html
which explains what the newbies list is for.

However, your question reminds me of a technique which I occasionally
used some years ago from the excellent "The Complete FreeBSD" by Greg
Lehey, which I'll describe below in case it helps.

In those days the default layout had /var in the fairly small / partition
and it was useful to move it to the much larger /usr partition like so:

# mkdir /usr/var
# cd /var
# tar cf - . | (cd /usr/var; tar xf - )
# cd /
# rm -rf /var
# ln -s /usr/var /var

I suggest you simply mount the new large partition at the temporary
mount point you initially used and replace 'usr' above with the name
of that mount point.

You may find that you cant remove the old /var because /var/empty has
the system immutable flag (schg) set, in which case:
# chflags -RH noschg /var/empty
and then rm it.  Probably a good idea to set the schg flag on the new
/var/empty.  Use ls -lo to see if it's set.

I was pleased to read your question as I'll soon be building a PC
for experimenting with a MySQL database, and it highlighted the
need for a larger /var than I would have created.  Thanks :)

-- 
John.