SUMMARY: Sanity check needed ...

[Debbie Tropiano <debbiet@arlut.utexas.edu>]

Folks -

Thanks for the quick replies.  It seems that several people have
done this in the past and/or knew definitively that it will work:

Jeffrey Taylor:
|| I don't know about RH 6.2 specifically, but I've run 7.1 and 7.2 with
|| just a swap file.  And some others that I don't remember the exact
|| distro and version.

Mark Ferlatte:
|| Sure.  man mkswap should tell you how, but the basic idea is to dd out a
|| file of the correct size, and then use mkswap to initialize it, and then
|| use swapon to activate it.  You aren't actually required to have any
|| swap at all, technically... things will just break, severely, if you use
|| all available RAM and have no swap enabled.  Depending on how loaded
|| that server is, not having a swap at all might be a feasible solution.
|| 
|| But you can definately just use a file, instead of a partition.

John Madden:
|| Yes, it's quite possible.  Really, as far as ease of management is
|| concerned, I believe its *better* to use files, as you can add more as
|| needed.  I believe RH's installer is somewhat silly about this-- last time I
|| checked, you *had* to add at least one swap partition.

Others had useful comments as well, but we really just want to do the
swap file thing for now (we definitely don't want to power it off, as
it's become quite finicky and don't want to risk problems getting it
booted back up).

Thanks so much,
Debbie

My original post:

Short version:
        Is it possible to run a RedHat 6.2 system with just a swapfile
        and not a swap partition (no, I didn't ask if it was the "best
        practice" just if it's *possible* :-)?

Long version:
        The partition table has gotten completely messed up on a RAID 5
        device that contains both the swap partition and the /home filesystem.
        I don't know what happened to it (and I don't think that the box
        got hacked -- more likely it got severely corrupted with the loss
        of some disk drives last week :-).  The rest of the OS is on a
        RAID 1 device, so is not affected.  Right now we can't rebuild the
        full system, so I'm looking for a way to get it to limp along for
        a few weeks until we can take some *positive* action, thus I just
        need to know if I can comment the swap partition out of the /etc/fstab
        file and setup a swapfile elsewhere to be used.


-- 
| Debbie Tropiano                            |  debbiet@arlut.utexas.edu   |
| Space and Geophysics Laboratory            |     +1 512 835 3367 w       |
| Applied Research Laboratories of UT Austin |     +1 512 835 3100 fax     |
| P.O. Box 8029, Austin, TX 78713-8029       | home email: debbie@icus.com |
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