I just noticed that all of our RHE5 servers from ThePlanet have a very size limited /var partition. With the MySQL databases going into /var I also notice that this partition is nearly full on several servers, (i.e. due to some customers with large databases), while the general /home directory still has plenty of space.

What gives? Can we easily do away with this limited /var partition and go back to the way it was, of course without scrapping everyone's databases? How could we accomplish this without doing something like downgrading to RHE4 or something like that?

And do we need to request that our new RHE servers be reformatted without the /var partition, or what?

There are two ways to go about this.

One is to repartition the drive, this will require a complete format, reload, and restoration.

The other is to add another drive to the machine, copy/move the data over to the new partition and then mount it as the /var

If you expect to grow beyond the current drive's size, the second option will be best. It would also require less downtime by eliminating the need for an OS reload and restore.

Thanks Tomy,

How about this third possible route (via SSH):
========
service stop mysql
cp -r /var/lib/mysql /home/mysql
rm -rf /var/lib/mysql
ln -s /home/mysql /var/lib/mysql
service start mysql
========

Anything wrong with that? So you suppose MySQL will still operate fine, will still find all the databases, etc.?

Second question:
Do we need to make a special request each time we put on a new server, that the main server drive is NOT formatted with a /var partition?

Theoretically, that would work. I'm not aware of any specific issues that would be caused by symlinks. You could also move the files and then change my.cnf and not worry about the symlinks.

You'll also want to do a chown -R mysql.mysql /home/mysql in there if you do go with your suggestion.

Our default schemes do have a /var, if you don't want it or want a certain size, we can accommodate your requests, as long as they're technically possible and it's a supported filesystem and partitioning table.