var partition is too small

[Redmond Militante]

hi all

the var partition on my apache box may be too small.
this is a problem because - 
i originally had newsyslog set at

/var/log/httpd-access.log               644  7     100  24    B /var/run/httpd.pid 30

which sets httpd-access.log to be rotated in binary format everytime it reaches 100 mb or once every hour for 24 hours.
which basically means we only archive less than a day's worth of httpd-access.log's on this machine...


the /var partition on this machine is 252 mb.

yesterday i was told asked to start archiving httpd-access.logs for analysis over longer periods of time - that i should be keeping a year's worth of logs, if possible.  i remember the original reason i set up newsyslog.conf to rotate httpd-access.logs on this machine so frequently is because the webserver is really busy, and this file tends to grow pretty rapidly, and i didn't want to have to log in, stop apache, and archive the logs by hand every day...

yesterday i looked into expanding the size of my /var partition by symlinking.

-drop to single user mode
-stop syslogd
-mv /var to /usr/var
-umount /var
-delete /var directory
-create symlink from /usr/var to /var

it seems easy, and i did it successfully once, but i hosed a (non)production box yesterday practicing the above procedure.

i have a number of questions:
-if i copy the contents of /var to /usr/var, then delete the var directory, do i need to modify my fstab?

my fstab right now looks like

/dev/aacd0s1g           /usr            ufs     rw              2       2
/dev/aacd0s1e           /var            ufs     rw              2       2

-do i need to modify this so that /var now points to a directory inside /usr? and how?
-i'm thinking that this may be too risky a procedure to try on a production box (i guess i'm spooked from ruining the practice box...) - anyone think i should just archive these logs by hand to someplace in my home directory (/usr is very large on this box - 65 gb - and hardly used)?  my goal is basically to keep an archive of httpd-access.logs for as long as possible to produce a comprehensive webalizer report...

thanks again

redmond






-- 
FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE-p5 FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE-p5 #0: Wed Sep 24 09:12:23 CDT 2003
 8:30AM  up 1 day, 17:54, 2 users, load averages: 0.61, 0.58, 0.55
 
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