/home

[neilconway]

Not really a bug, but why is /home a separate, smaller filesystem? If I'd like to make use of the entire 10GB default storage allocation, this configuration makes things more difficult.

[neilconway]

Ping :)

The Arch box would be a lot easier to use (at least to me) if (a) there was a single filesystem, not an arbitrary split between / and /home (b) the default HDD was larger -- say 40GB, dynamically allocated.

[terrywang]

@neilconway Apology for the late response ;-D Have been busy with stuff.

A sweet /home on separate partition or block device is just a long time best practice as a desktop user.

The current Arch Linux vagrant base box has a small 10GB ONLY virtual disk, which is too small for most use cases nowadays.

NOTE: When the base box (VirtualBox) VM was initially created, I just wanted to make it a reusable minimum install with pretty much all tools I needed to do the daily job, if more storage is needed personally I'll add more Virtual HDDs and add them to existing LVM (VG) or create a separate file system and mount it.

Later on I made it a vagrant base box when learning Vagrant. I didn't expect the Arch Linux base box to be this popular ;-D

I have 2 options:

1. resize the current 10GB virtual hard disk to 40GB while still keep / (30GB) and /home (10GB) separate
2. resize the current 10GB virtual hard disk to 40GB and create a single / file system on the block device

I prefer option 1 at this stage, let me know your thoughts.

[neilconway]

@terrywang Thanks for the response!

My personal opinion is that a separate partition for /home made sense in the past (especially for multi-user Unix installations -- e.g., make it harder for a rogue user to use up all disk-space on the root partition), but is less sensible now, since many/most Vagrant boxes are single-user. I think option 2 is the best default -- of course people can reconfigure it as needed, but it mean the most flexibility for how users want to allocate disk space.

[terrywang]

@neilconway Already tried option 2 and the process is pretty straightforward.

Will make the change in the next update and document process in this issue (later on move to a wiki page) for the curious cats ;-D

[neilconway]

@terrywang Awesome!! Thank you.

[terrywang]

Steps to move to a single / file system and increase the VDI size from 10GB to 40GB.

NOTE: Before proceeding, copy entire /home over to a temporary directory, e.g. using my personal favourite tool rsync -> rsync -axHAX --progress --stats /home /mnt.

1. Unmount /home -> umount -l /home
2. rm -rf/home; mv /mnt/home / ;-D
3. Use parted to remove second partition, in this case /dev/sda2, number 2 -> rm 2
4. Boot with System Rescue CD ISO
5. Resize the first partition, in this case grow it using all available free space resizepart 1 100%
6. Quit parted
7. Run fsck against the resized / -> e2fsck -f /dev/sda1
8. Grow the ext4 file system (as the underlying block device size changed) -> resize2fs -Fp /dev/sda1
9. Remove /dev/sda2 entry from /etc/fstab, otherwise systemd will get stuck on boot
10. Now we can resize the VDI using VirtualBox's lovely and powerful CLI -> VBoxManage modifyhd --resize 40960 /path/to/arch.vdi
11. Boot with system rescue CD ISO again
12. Repeat step 4,5,6,7,8
13. Done

[marco-m]

Looks like this can be closed