Not enough memory?

[Krigare]

What to do if you dont have enough memory and you dont want to repartition your harddrives:
(good for servers that needs high uptimes)

This is how you create and activate a 256mb swap block device

1: # dd if=/dev/zero bs=1MB of=/extraswap count=256
2: # mkswap /extraswap
3: # swapon /extraswap

Thats it! Remember, it wont work if you use seek instead of count
(result is: swapon: Skipping file - it appears to have holes.)

Thanks goes to CruelTott
_________________
Together we are strong.

[meowsqueak]

Seek is used to skip the beginning of the output file. So, 'seek=256 count=256' will create a file twice the size, with only the second half read from 'if=/dev/zero'. I'm not sure what goes in the first half - 'stat' shows the same number of blocks as just using 'count', so I suspect it creates a 'sparse' file.