The Shrine

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>Unix server I admin has run out of room on the root partition because the dingus who did this before me gave it little space. mySQL will now not work because of this, anyone have a suggestion on how to fix it?</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Sans Serif"; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 15% 0% 15%; '>Add more space to the root partition or delete someting out of it? :) And BTW, you should be using Postgres for all of our open source relational database needs...</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>is there a way to take space off of one partition and add it to root? And our major teaches mySQL so that's what we offer</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>You need repartitioning software that preserves data. Sine and I had this discussion a while back, and I'm not aware of any. The complete solution is back everything up, then start over from scratch.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Any for a Unix based OS, that is.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Tahoma; text-align: left; '>Partition Magic? I've used it and it works great. Of course, i know nothing about whether this works on Linux or what the hell you guys are talking about, so..</div>

<div style='font: 12pt "Times New Roman"; text-align: left; '>The Mandrake installer used to claim it could do this, but ended up ruining data. No idea if its fixed by now</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>It's Windows only.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>we're switching to new hardware by January so restarting over isn't really going to be productive. We're just looking for a solution to work for the few months until then</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Tahoma; text-align: left; '>I thought that was supposed to be the advantage of Linux as an OS, can use windows stuff but be better than windows?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Tahoma; text-align: left; '>ugh, this is a Unix topic and not Linux, i knew i should have stayed out of it...</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>well if I can't repartition...can I move the mySQL database to another partition?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>That's a semi-misleading statement: source code written for a particular OS is generally not compatible with a different OS, but in some cases, it is. But it's generally just going from one Unix based OS to another. (It is possible to factor out OS specific stuff from an application, and maintain, say, Linux stuff in one part of the source, and Windows in another, but you're still not using the same code on the same OS.)

As far as I know (Sun's recent claims notwithstanding), a binary for one OS is not compatible with another OS.

There are advantages to using Linux over Windows, but the ability to use off the shelf applications is not one of them.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Probably. Reinstall mySQL to a different partition, do a dump of the entire old database, then load that image into the new one. That should work.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>how would you dump / load it?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>I've forgotten. But, luckily, Google exists.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt georgia; text-align: left; '>parted?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Of course, it depends on what the other admin factored out of the root partition. Anyway, the best solution would be to remove a secondary partition (with plenty of free space) that can be backed up, and create two more. One would be the replacement of the one you just clobbered (as a smaller size, of course), and the other would be a place to put one of the directories in root. Here's what my setup generally is:

/ - Very small (maybe only a few hundred MBs)
/var - Small (1GB or so)
/var/log - Medium (1-2GB, depending on how big the log files get)
/home - Large (especially on a server)
/usr - Very large (biggest cut)
/boot - (Optional) Extremely small (maybe 50MBs)

/tmp - symbolic link to /var/tmp
/usr/local - symbolic link to . [/usr] (fucking stupid idea for a directory anyway)
/usr/X11R6 - symbolic link to X11 (sometimes people uses these two interchangably)
/opt - symbolic link to /usr/opt

In any case, look at the current size of your directories before thinking of size recommendations. However, it is best to have as many partitions as you can, without running into space problems with any one of them. On the plus side, if one of the partitions fail, you're not going to lose everything. On the negative side, if you have too many partitions, you may run into space problems on one with major problems fixing it. (The general solution for the latter problem is move a big directory within the overloaded partition to one that has enough space, and then use a symbolic link.)</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Wait. The MySQL data is on the root partition?!</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>I don't know exactly where it is, but root is at 100% usage and people say they can't get mySQL to work cause it says it's out of space</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>You better find shit like that out. MySQL databases are usually in the /var directory. (/var/lib/mysql, I think...)</div>