On 12/23/18 3:16 PM, John Long wrote: > I'm running release instead of stable like I did years ago. Syspatch is > a better solution for me than building from source. I want to change my > disk layout because when I set up this box I was thinking of building > from source like the old days. I want to eliminate some filesystems and > move /var and resize it. I can't growfs where /var is right now, the > filesystems I want to get rid of precede it. > > Is it better to do this kind of thing single-user (is it even possible > to run without /var) or is it better to boot the installer disk and do > it from a shell without anything mounted?
It depends. If you have to ask the question, the answer is probably you shouldn't. You don't want to run with a /var directory. You can't easily populate a /var directory from a mounted /var. You can't umount /var and have a happy day (guess how I know). IF you have a drive with some free space, there are lots of options, including making or recycling partitions and shuffling things around until you get what you want. For example, you could maybe copy /var to /tmp, change fstab so your old /tmp is /var on reboot, reboot, then you can do what you want with the old /var. When done, copy the data from your tmp var to the goal var, and change fstab again, reboot, ta-da. (note: you want to make sure only you are on the box and no exposed services are running when you do things that hose the OpenBSD security models!) You can't use growfs on a live file system, but if you plan/work things out right, there's a lot you can often do without even having a remote console. This is again why I argue, just because you got a 500g drive on your firewall doesn't mean you need to allocate all of it. Give me 20g spare space and there isn't much I couldn't shuffle on a system, even remotely (I can't move /. I can't necessarily save data without someplace else to put it). Nick.
