[K12OSN] Help, need more space on ext3 partition

[Paul Davison]

Guy-Michel Lessard wrote:
> My root (/) partition is very full and the students could not get logged 
> in. I purged some files and got 50MB of free space.
> There is and
> I have 3GB root(/), 2GB(/home), 256MB swap and 7GB of free space on the 
> disk in that order.
> I moved the swap partition out of the way to the end so as to move /home 
> partition but then Qtparted et Partition Magic does'nt  want to 
> redimension or move ext3. I looked up Qtparted homepage and it states 
> that i cant move or resize Ext2 and 3.
> 1- Does someone know how to increase this partition?
> 2- I remenber having seen something about adding a partition so as to 
> increase a existant linux partition, has someone seen or used this?
> 

judging by your layout above, you probably are running out of space on 
your root partition due to your mail spool and logs. it is always a 
pretty good idea to have those seperated from the root partition for 
reasons you have already seen.

here are some steps you can take
go into single user mode, or boot using knoppix or some live cd/floppy
create a 4Gb partition in your 7Gb free space, format it and mount it
copy the /var directory structure to the new partition and verify
delete the contents under /var
add the new partition to /etc/fstab  with a /var mountpoint
reboot and you should have lots of space on your root partition.

This is not a step by step obviously, if you need more explicit 
instructions let me know.

Paul