Hi people my thread is about my lack of brain memory not computers memory, i was in the mission of migrating a friend from windowsxp to linux(after he got infected with a virus i convinced him). So i went to his house repartition his 160gb drive to 32mb /boot 20gb / and 100gb /home as you can see i completly forgot the swap partition. Installed ubuntu, everything went great except for a problem in the sound which i will not discuss in this forum. i got home i connected thrugh ssh and installed mplayer amsn etc. every thing seemed to go great, but i when i woke up this morning i remembered "no i didn't created the swap partition".
Now this is the situation, i am not able to access the machine fisicaly due to time table problems. i must conect through secure shell and kind of cut /home partition create a 512mb swap partition and dont errase any thing in the home directory. How do you think i can do this without messing up ? thank you.

You could try using GNU Parted. Make sure your filesystem is supported.

Hi thak you for your fast reply, anyway i was wondering if i could back up /home on a tmp folder on /mnt unmount home delete home partition and create the swap partition+home partition then swapon partition and remount new /home and copy the backed up files, is that posible through secure shell and how can it affect my friends system, apart from reducing his /home disk space.
thank you.

You might also decide to just see how the system runs without a swap partition. No, it won't be able to swap anywhere, but it might not need to.

Another possibility would be to purchase a second disk-drive .. not a bad idea anyway .. and install that. This gives you oodles more space to play around with, and you can easily put your swap-space there. (Actually, having swap space on a separate drive from the main system-residence volume is not a bad idea anyhow.)

At this point, I think that's what I would do.

None of this is something to do "non-physically." Bring pizza. And beer.

That's a quite feasible solution. And besides the storage space
ssh takes a fair bit of processing in file-transfers. If his CPU is a
very grunty one he probably won't notice, though.

The easiest way for you would be a plain
scp -r /home/<user> <account>@<friends-box>:/path/to/lots/of/disk

Less CPU intense for his box:
tar czf - /home/<user> | ssh <account>@<friends-box> "dd of=/path/to/lots/of/disk/tarfile"
For the latter to make sense your mate should disable
compression for his sshd.




Cheers,
Tink

don't forget you can make a swapfile.
dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1M count=512
mkswap swapfile
swapon swapfile

then add the entry to fstab or one of your startup scripts.