Making big ones out of little ones [was: tlug: Debian install...]

[ulrike@example.com]

<stephen>

Eg, I'm looking at a 1GB partition
mounted on /usr, and that's just not going to cut it if Debian keeps
adding packages at the current rate.  So I can add 33% free space to
that partition by creating a 500MB partition somewhere (say
/dev/sdb1), formatting it, mounting it to /tmp/share, copying
/usr/share recursively to /tmp/share, then adding

/dev/sdb1 /usr/share ext2 defaults 0 2

to /etc/fstab, and doing `diff -rq /usr/share /tmp/share >
/tmp/just-for-grins' to make sure everything's OK before doing rm -rf
/usr/share; mkdir /usr/share; umount /tmp/share; mount /usr/share.

</stephen>

OK, how about this scenario: I tried to install some packages with dselect, and 
before it is finished the drive on which I mounted /usr is 100% full ( which 
confirms my fears about my partitioning). On the other hand the much larger 
drive on which I mounted /var is only 2% full, so I would like to change this, 
swap them if possible. Now before I screw up my not yet really existing system 
if possible I would like to have a confirmation about the following strategy: I 
move /usr to /tmp/usr assuming that /tmp is on the same drive with / which would 
have enough room. Then I exchange /usr and /var in fstab .. ??? No - err - error 
- ??? I won't solve it today, what is the solution? And isn't something missing 
in the example above? Some moving of files at some point?


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