Compressing /usr Filesystem

Louis A. Bloomfield lab3e at landau5.phys.virginia.edu
Thu Jan 3 00:53:19 AEST 1991


A number of individuals have noted difficulty in removing /usr in order
to compress that filesystem.  The reason /usr won't umount is that the
Korn Shell is holding on to it.  To compress /usr, I have done the following:

1) saved /usr to disk or tape and made a copy of /etc/filesystems
2) set root to use csh (not ksh) and logged in as root
3) telinit 1
4) killall -
5) umount /usr    (It will actually umount successfully)
6) destroyed /usr (the filesystem and logical volume)
7) recreated /usr (the logical volume and filesystem)
8) restored /usr from disk or tape
9) restored /etc/filesystems from the copy
10) telinit 2 (or rebooted)

It scared me to death, but it worked.  I don't know if saving the
/etc/filesystems was important, but I wanted to be sure that the
order of filesystems in that file didn't cause trouble.  One note of
warning:  once I had umounted /usr, SMIT stopped working well.  After
you umount /usr, try smit.  If you find that it is still usable,
you can proceed.  If not, learn how to do steps 6 to 8 from the csh.
I succeeded in using smit by typing cntl-N and cntl-P even though it
had great difficulty talking to my screen and keyboard.  I suppose it
lost some obvious terminal information file that I don't know about.
Anyway, my /usr directory is now just the right size and I hope never
to compress it again.

Louis A. Bloomfield                 LAB3E at VIRGINIA.EDU
Department of Physics               LAB3E at VIRGINIA.BITNET
University of Virginia



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