Questions and Answers
Jim McKinstry and Amy Rich
Q: I have an AIX machine where /var keeps filling up, and I need to make it bigger. How do I increase the size of my /var filesystem, and where does the space come from?
A: The space comes from the free physical partitions in the volume group in which your partition (the one you want to increase) resides. A volume group consists of physical volumes that are made up of physical partitions. The logical volumes (e.g., /var,/usr, /) then consist of the physical partitions. Your/var logical volume is probably in rootvg, so you can do an
lsvg -p rootvg
to see the physical volumes in the volume group rootvg. If you have the free physical partitions in rootvg, you can do the following to increase /var to be 100 Mb by doing the following
chfs -a size='102400' /var
For more information on the Logical Volume Manager, you may want to take a look at IBM's Redbooks (search for LVM)
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/pubs/html/redbooks/
Q: I've heard of some people creating ramdisks under AIX, but I can't find out how from the documentation.
A: Ramdisks are a new feature in 4.3.3, and are still unsupported. Prior to that, the best you could hope for was to modify the RAM disk buffer. As of 4.3.3, you can create a ramdisk by doing the following
mkramdisk <size>
/dev/rramdiskxx
mkfs -V jfs /dev/ramdiskxx
mount -V jfs -o nointegrity /dev/ramdiskxx /your_mount_point
Q: Where can I pick up precompiled freeware packages for AIX 4.3?
A: IBM has a number of GNU tools precompiled at the following site:
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