[ale] mint 13 vm running out of storage space

[Ed Cashin]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 10:59 AM, Michael B. Trausch <mbt at naunetcorp.com>wrote:
...

> I don't use thin provisioning on the disk... personally, I think it's
> asking for trouble.
>

When you're creating disposable, seldom-used VMs for development, thin
provisioning can be nice, and you can often get by with something more
lightweight than LVM---sparse files.

The dd command allows you to write way past the end of a file to create a
sparse file, and tools like GNU cp and rsync have options that allow sparse
files to be treated as such.

I made a script that helps me conveniently use dd to create image files for
VM disks (and loop device disks, or whatever).

  http://noserose.net/e/code/sparsefile

I think you can use dd again to write past the end again, and then you can
boot the VM from a CD image and resize the filesystem, if the fs supports
that (many do).

-- 
  Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net>
  http://noserose.net/e/
  http://www.coraid.com/
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