Quota and var

[vidigiani]

Traditionally I always put var on a separate slice. However, I followed the install guide verbatim to get my system up and running. Now I am a bit concerned because I want to run an mta on the system that is connected to the internet. Is it possible to add a quota to the var filesystem and be safe?

Alternatively has any had an experience with safely repartitioning their drive without losing data and mount a new filesystem with the free space? Think something like what you could with Veritas Volume Manager/File System.

[Petyr]

I don't know about the quota question, but I can answer your partition question.

As long as you can ensure the following you will be okay
1) The freespace is either BEFORE everything, or AFTER everything (normally it's after)
2) You do NOT want to resize, or move any other partitions, you only wish to create a new one in the freespace

It's usually a LOT safer to do this from a bootable CD, that way you can do partition, resync, mount and test. If you're paranoid about it, get a good working backup of the system first, then play with that partitions. Personally this is why I use LVM, I don't have to worry about partitions anymore ^^ Completely safe to resize on the fly no reboots or anything.

Petyr