[Nottingham] Mount and Filesystem

[Peter Chang]

Hi Raph,

You can't combine partitions like you want unless you use logical volumes 
(lvm2 on top of device mapper). But you can mount filesystems in 
sub-directories of an extant fs:

/dev/sda1 -> /var

/dev/sdb1 -> /var/log

The steps are

1) create a new mount point (mkdir /var/foo)
2) create the new filesystem and mount it to /var/foo
3) bring down the processes that are writing to /var (go to whatever 
initlevel is needed with telinit)
4) copy stuff over from whatever directory (eg, /var/log) you're replacing
5) unmount new fs
6) rename the old directory
7) create a new directory with the same name as the old one for use as a 
mount point
8) mount new fs on that new mount point
9) send appropriate signals to any processes still writing to the old 
directory to make them open a new (log) file
10) configure /etc/fstab (or use whatever TUI or GUI to point a partition
  to a mount point) to allow the system to automatically mount the new fs
11) tidy up (remove first mount point /var/foo, bring the system up to the 
original initlevel)

hth
  Peter


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