[NTLUG:Discuss] Software RAID using file "device"?

[Burton Strauss]

How about just using a link.  Pick one large directory on the stuffed
partition and move it's contents to a directory on the partition that has
space.  Then create a soft link (ln -sf ) from the new location to the old.

It should be transparent to just about everything, except for a few tools
that explicitly don't follow links.


-----Burton 

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at ntlug.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at ntlug.org] On Behalf
Of Stuart Johnston
Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2005 7:47 PM
To: NTLUG Discussion List
Subject: [NTLUG:Discuss] Software RAID using file "device"?

I have a server with two partitions, / and /home (not the best setup, I
know).  The /home partition is coming very close to running out of disk
space and I am trying to figure out a way to use some of the extra space on
/ without requiring a trip down to the data center.  This would only need to
be a temporary solution.

When I setup the system, I didn't worry too much about the partition setup
because I was using LVM, which I thought would allow me to easily
re-allocate the partitions as needed.  It turns out not to be quite so easy
since you can't generally resize an ext3 partition while it is mounted.

I was thinking about how in Linux, devices are treated like files and you
can often use them interchangeably.  So, if I created a file on / then I
could use it as a device in mdadm or lvm to combine linearly with the /home
partition (which can be unmounted and resized remotely). 
Unfortuntately, neither mdadm nor lvm seem to be willing to work with a
non-block device.

Any suggestions on how to make this work?

thanks,
Stuart Johnston

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