Markus Egg said the following on 02/06/2013 11:00 AM:
Von: Anton Aylward <opensuse@antonaylward.com>
*THAT* was your mistake. The 'defaults' are 'general purpose'. 'News' has specific needs.
I assumed that this was the mistake. I remembered that there were issues mentioned in the documentation of SuSE 10.3 and I thought that SuSE 12.1 takes care of that, but it did not. :-(
Well there is /etc/mke2fs.conf which "takes care of that" :-(
[...]
*MY* "solution' is not to use an ext file system. I use ReiserFS which is dynamic about its allocation. There are no fixed numbers of inodes. This is how things *should* be, in MNSHO. You should not be tied down to having to get your initialization parameters right. This is also why I use LVM - I don't want to have to get the size of the partition and FS 'right' to start with!
I thought of the following solution: 1) save fstab somewhere
Not actually needed. What you *DO* need is to be in single user/maintenance mode. That is much more important! All you're going to do with the fstab is ADD one entry for the new file system. That's all. I discuss this below.
2) rm the usenet part in /var/spool/news
Check
3) tar the rest of /var somewhere else (e.g. some external USB-disk)
Check. This is where my decision to use 5G partitions comes into play. Everything is made up out of 5G partitions that get backed up onto DVD. Well, not *everything*. There's a lot you don't need to back up if you're doing a reinstall :-)
4) use gparted to reboot into the gparted system and then reformat /var with reiserfs.
You can. This is where my decision to use LVM comes into play :-) I can shrink the file system - yes you can do that with ext4 - then shrink the partition, freeing up space for another partition. I suppose you could do the same with /var on a fixed size partition, using parted. Hmm Gparted requires multi-user mode. You don't want to be doing this in multi user mode! Why not? First, multi-user mode isn't going to be happy with /var unmounted! There are other processes that will want to access it. Again, this is why I favour ReiserFS and LVM. I can shrink or expand a ReiserFS without having to unmount it and I can alter size of a LVM partition to match the new reduced size of the FS without having to unmount the FS or go to single user mode. Similar for growing a partition & FS. Similar for adding a new partition and FS. No need to reboot to re-read the partition table either. Your situation is not that of a LVM. It is possible to resize the /var file system in single user mode and then shrink the partition, but its a *s*c*a*r*y* thing to try so the backup/restore is your best way. *IF* You are simply converting /var to a resierFS - which is the simplest thing here - then there's no need to resize the partitions, just backup, do the mkfs.resiserfs, then edit /etc/fstab to change the FS type of /var, mount and restore then go multi-user. *HOWEVER* is you are going to resize the partition for /var and create a new partition for /var/spool/news then you'll have to think about sizes - which while different than thinking about inode/data ratios is still a buqqer and why I chose to go with ReiserFS and LVM.
5) play back the /var content onto the new reiser-var
Not yet.
6) mount /etc with the gparted system
No. What you want is to create a new entry in /etc/fstab for the reiserFS with news. It will look something like this /dev/sda6 /var/spool/news reiserfs defaults 1 2 I can't tell what partition so I'm guessing sda6, you'll have to figure that yourself. ReiserFS can be mounted with options that will make it a bit faster, check the mount man page for these. Of course there's the issue of one partition or two.
7) But what do I have to enter into the /etc/fstab manually afterwards? Put the fstab onto /etc
See above.
8) if 7) is done reboot to SuSE 12.1
Its the resizing of the partition and the creation of the new partition that necessitates this.
9) transfer the /var/spool/news onto the new /var under SuSE 12.1
Is that feasible? I already did some 200GB -> 500GB enlargements with gparted and SuSE 10.3 . It was tricky but it worked.
Maybe I'm confused here. Some of what you wrote indicates that you're creating a new news partition, some of it that you're not and are just converting /var to a ResiserFS. Or are you creating a new partition with a ReiserFS for /var/spool/news *AND* converting /var itself to a ResiserFS? In all of the above I'd strongly suggest reading the man pages and googling around to clarify anything you're not clear about BEFOREHAND. Now you know why I'm experimenting with a single FS using BtrFS and nothing else: no /boot; no worries about merging / and /usr; no worries about inode/data ratios; no worries about barriers. -- If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing. -- W. Edwards Deming -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org