Expanding the /home on AIX

Good Morning All,

We have an AIX server that is used as our e-mail server (Squirell Mail). The /home directory is filling up quite rapidly. We cleaned it out once a few months back by getting rid of a lot of e-mail that were obviously just old. That dropped it down to 60% used or so. Now it has krept back up to 99%. I'm told that there is a way to tell how much each directory has been allocated and whether there is any room to expand. Basically I need to know how to check this and then If there is room to be expanded into how I resize the /home directory into that space. Thank you all for your help. As you can tell I am a unix beginner at best. Thanks again.

Jesse

Well, for disk usage there's du command (-g, -k or -m parameters make the sizes easier to understand). lsfs should list the filesystems and give some general information about them.

Resizing /home depends on the filesystem used. I found this (http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:5T6Svde8SVgJ:www.netapp.com/library/tr/3305.pdf&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1) as one example for AIX.

However, I've never used AIX myself, so I don't know much about the details.

AIX does not allocate space per directory -- no *nix systems do -- they mount
a partition (or filesystem) at a mount point.

the prior comment re DU is correct --
it will show the capacity and the free block count(FBC). FBC x block size = free space(bytes).

the normal means to 'expand' is to:

delete the junk first
dismount the partition
backup the device
create a NEW partition of a larger size
restore the recent backup onto it
mount the NEW partition


btw: /home is the location for user's home directories

it is bad practice to have system services on this filesystem;
services get impacted by users and conversely!

I would guess it is the users' mailboxes that are in /home, not the actual mail server software or spool.

First, there are two limits on every filesystem - the number of files and the data size. With mailservers possibly dealing with lots of small files, the first limit may come up before the second.

You might want to consider setting up per-user quotas on /home so that no individual mailbox can grow above X in size or that no user can have more than n files.

You could also see which users are using the most disk space and notify them. Something like "du -k | sort -n" should give you a nice list sorted by directory size.