UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm interested in adding more swap space to my current workstation (Solaris 10). I currently have 2 hard drives installed, however the system was only created with 512MB for swap that resides on drive 1. This drive is already sliced up and all slices are being used.

The second drive has two slices (50G & 25G), however only the 50GB slice is being used. Is there a way I can slice the 25GB into two slices and use one of the new slices for swap? I have data on the 50G slice that I can't afford to lose.

I realize that more swap can be added by simply creating a file and using that as swap, but I'd rather using a partition (if possible) since I have it available.

In addition (for my future reference), are swap related errors written to /var/adm/messages? I looked in this file and it ONLY had two lines that were dated two days ago. These entries were unrelated to swap. Is this file purged on reboot? The workstation has been active for 6-months now and there were only 2 lines in this file.

Thanks.

Use the format command to change the partitions - copy the original set up, use only the cylinders from the 25GB when changing the old and new entry.

See this thread which shows an example of building a new partition from unused space (you would use the space from the 25G parition instead by splitting it - make sure the space isn't used or mounted when you go to do this)

/var/adm/messages is only going to have what the system is sending it - you need to look at your /etc/syslog.conf to see where it's sending messages. Use the search button on any page on this web site to search for syslog.conf - this has been explained before.

# by default, solaris does a "log rotate" every saturday night (better : sunday dawn) with /var/adm/messages

# it stores and ages the last 6 messages files .

(this is why you find 'messages.0' , '.1' ... until '.6' on /var/adm)

# so you only have the last 6 weeks of log , plus the current one .

# these files are NOT purged on reboot .

good luck , and success !

Thanks RTM. Your directions worked perfectly and I didn't loose any data.

Appreciate the info on /var/adm/messages Botato; I'll have to remember that.