[gentoo-user] how touchy is /var really? And how to keep tabs on a new disk?

[Michael Higgins]

So, in setting up a huge repository of junk, I mean, important business documents, I nearly ran out of disk space on rootfs. Much of it was living in /var, like half the disk's worth.

I'd just dropped a new disk in for /home... to move some Outlook files to IMAP & maildir folders. Had I been thinking ahead, I would have partitioned it for /var as well, but I didn't.

So, I rsyncd /var to /home/varlink, moved /var to /oldvar, 'soft' linked /var to /home/varlink/var and restarted some services that were less than happy with the change, like the mail servers, mysql. Everything seems to work now.

Now, was that a stupid thing to do, or should everything under /var continue to work still, without issues? 

/home is mounted in fstab, just like rootfs. I'm worried about a reboot not working for some reason
.

As for the new disk, it is only new to this machine. It's SCSI and sits on its own controller, reiserfs format. I think perhaps it originally was intermittently failing in a higher-speed controller and got swapped out. Is there a way I can keep regularly checking it for performance issues, should any crop up?

Cheers,

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 michael.higgins[at]evolone[dot]org