Question about /tmp on OLD RH

[Rick Stevens]

On Mon, 2005-10-03 at 11:00 -0700, John Reynolds wrote:
> Hail, collective mind.
> 
> We have a system running RedHat 7.2 (yes, you shake the case and stone 
> arrowheads fall out).  A user wants /tmp increased; it's current part of 
> the root partition.  You can't increase / without reconfiguring the 
> system, which I am not about to do if it can be avoided.  It would be an 
> easy fix if /tmp could use swap space.  I haven't been able to find out if 
> this is possible or no.  Since the system is about 500 miles away, I can't 
> experiment; any change I make has to *work*. 
> 
> Does RH7.2 support tmpfs?  What would the fstab entry look like?  Is there 
> an option I'm overlooking to solve the original problem of increasing 
> /tmp?

Cheap and dirty?  Find a big partition (say "/usr").  Then, reboot in
single user mode ("linux single" at the boot prompt).  Once at the hash
prompt:

	# mkdir /usr/newtmp
	# cp -a /tmp/* /usr/newtmp
	# rm -rf /tmp
	# ln -s /usr/newtmp /tmp

What this does is create a new temp directory, "/usr/newtmp".  You then
copy the contents of the existing /tmp into it, delete the old /tmp
directory and create a symbolic link to the new /usr/newtmp and give it
the old /tmp name.

This generally works.  There may be occasions where this might not be
ideal--particularly where the system is trying to recover from a disk
corruption and /usr isn't mounted yet.  However, for 95% of folk,
this'll work.

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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-                He who laughs last thinks slowest.                  -
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