Finally adding that swap file

[Dotan Cohen]

On 10/29/05, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 29, 2005 at 03:03:35 +0200,
>   Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have one hard disk with three partions: /, /boot, and /home. I want
> > to add a swap file on the /home partion, because it has the most
> > available space. I found lots of pages where it gives instructions on
> > how to add the file, but they all seem to want to put the file on /.
>
> There does seem to be some sort of problem with it not being on /. The
> swapon -a during boot doesn't seem to turn on swapfiles on other partitions
> even though as far as I can tell they should be mounted by that point.
> swapon -a after boot does pick them up.
> I didn't pursue this too far, so I might have missed something. For the
> time being I put a swap file on both / and another file system (on a second
> disk). The one on / gives me enough swap space for normal use and I can
> turn on the other one manually after reboots.
>

I would consider putting it on / but / is at 70% capacity- 2.3 gigs 
free from a total of 7.5, whereas /home is at 30%: 6.6 free from a 
total of 9.5 gigs.  Or would I be better off putting the swap file on
/ despite that?

If I login as root and don't mount /home, could I partion it and put a
swap partion on it? I had researched this in the past, and had come to
the conclusion that on an ext3 partion this is not possible. I think
that it was Alex Dalloz who talked me out of if, and I know to follow
his word! But I don't think that I made it clear at the time that
/home was a seperate partion. Any thoughts/opinions/experience out
there?

It seems that if I put the swap file on /home then I will need to
manually start it as root when I log on. Is that simply the command:
"# swapon /swapfile"? Can I just add that to /etc/rc.d/rc.local and be
done with it?

Dotan Cohen

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