From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Jun 17 4:23: 2 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from value.net (value.net [209.182.128.4]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8A0D11545C for ; Thu, 17 Jun 1999 04:23:00 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from rfg@monkeys.com) Received: from monkeys.com (i180.value.net [206.14.136.180]) by value.net (8.8.7/8.7.4) with ESMTP id EAA09618; Thu, 17 Jun 1999 04:26:31 -0700 (PDT) Received: from monkeys.com ([127.0.0.1]) by monkeys.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id EAA10774; Thu, 17 Jun 1999 04:23:35 -0700 To: Ladavac Marino Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Desperate to shrink a partition In-reply-to: Your message of Thu, 17 Jun 1999 13:02:28 +0200. <55586E7391ACD211B9730000C1100276179681@r-lmh-wi-100.corpnet.at> From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 04:23:35 -0700 Message-ID: <10772.929618615@monkeys.com> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message <55586E7391ACD211B9730000C1100276179681@r-lmh-wi-100.corpnet.at>, yo u wrote: >> From: Ronald F. Guilmette [SMTP:rfg@monkeys.com] >> ... >> I desperately need to shrink a partition... > [ML] dump all (neigboring) partitions. > delete and re-create partitions in the partition editor. > restore all dumped partititons. No can do. Alright, Let me tell you my sad story. I have a system which I have shipped to some other folks. It has been installed and operating on the network belonging to these other folks for some long time now. It is accessible over the Internet, but physically, it is located in a galaxy far far away from me. I have no physical access to it, and the system doesn't even have a monitor on it most of the time. (And I would like to avoid asking these people who are hosting it to put a monitor on it, because that is a hassle for them.) The system is running FreeBSD 2.2.8. Under heavy load it now crashes and reboots itself on a regular basis... every few hours, at random. I get *no messages* in /var/log/messages saying what happened. Maybe some message would appear on the console, *if* this system had a console monitor, but it doesn't, so that's that. I figure that the only way for me to debug this ongoing frequent kernel panic problem from here is for me to get a kernel crash dump and then look at it using a debugger. Now the problem: When this system was setup (and partitioned) initially it had a MUCH bigger swap space than physical memory. It has since had physical memory added however. It now has 320MB physical and only a single 140MB swap partition setup for it. There are NO free partitions and adding another drive to the thing now would be a MAJOR hassle, and the people who are hosting it for me (far far away) probably will *not* want to even try doing that, even if I ship them a new/additional disk drive for the system. The book I am looking at (``The Complete FreeBSD'') says that I _cannot_ get a kernel panic-time dump _unless_ I have a swap partition that is at least as big as my physical memory. Well, I don't have that, so now what? Am I like totally screwed? Is there like any way out of this corner I seem to have painted myself into? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message