Linux commands for managing, partitioning,

troubleshooting
networkworld.com /article/3221415/linux/linux-commands-for-managing-partitioning-troubleshooting.html

By Sandra Henry-Stocker

How much do you need to know about disks to successfully manage a Linux system? What commands do what?
How do you make good decisions about partitioning? What kind of troubleshooting tools are available? What kind of
problems might you run into? This article covers a lot of territory from looking into the basics of a Linux file systems
to sampling some very useful commands.

Disk technology
In the beginning days of Unix and later Linux, disks were physically large, but very small in terms of storage capacity.
A 300 megabyte disk in the mid-90s was the size of a shoebox. Today, you can get multi-terrabyte disks that are the
size of a slice of toast.

Traditionally, files resided within file systems that resided in disk partitions that were themselves simply slices of
disks. This organization still dominates today, though servers in large data centers often take on an entirely different
structure.

/\
/ \
/ \
/ file \
/ \
/==========\
/ \
/ file system \
/ \
/==================\
/ disk partition \
/======================\
/ disk
\

/==========================\

This simplistic view still works for many systems, but these days there are lot of complexities that make disk
management harder in some ways and easier in others. A file system might be virtual no longer residing on a
single disk and more complex to manage, but far easier to resize as needed. In fact, the entire system could be
virtual. And what we might manage as if it were a single disk could actually be some portion of a very large disk
array.

Disk management
Sysadmins generally have to deal with many issues when it comes to managing disks. These include:

Partitioning disks
Creating file systems
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 Mounting file systems
Sharing file systems
Monitoring free space within file systems
Backing up (and sometimes restoring) file systems

The reasons to partition a disk include:

protecting some file systems from running out of space (e.g., you may want the OS partition to be separated
from home directories or applications to keep it from being affected if users files begin to take up far an
excessive amount of disk space)
improving performance
allocating swap space
facilitating maintenance and backups (e.g., you might be able to unmount /apps if its not part of / and you
might want to back up /home more frequently than /usr)
more efficient (and targeted) fsck
maintaining (particularly on test systems) multiple operating systems
reserving enough disk space for file system expansion
sharing select file systems with other systems

Partitioning commands
For most Linux servers, partitioning is done before the servers are deployed. On the other hand, you might add
disks at some later time or hold back some significant amount of free disk space for future use.

To make changes or verify partitions, enter a command such as fdisk /dev/sda to start fdisk interactively and then
type m to see a list of the things that you can do with the fdisk command.

$ sudo fdisk /dev/sda

Command (m for help): m

Command action
a toggle a bootable flag
b edit bsd disklabel
c toggle the dos compatibility flag
d delete a partition
l list known partition types
m print this menu
n add a new partition
o create a new empty DOS partition
table
p print the partition table
q quit without saving changes
s create a new empty Sun disklabel
t change a partition's system id
u change display/entry units
v verify the partition table
w write table to disk and exit
x extra functionality (experts only)

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As you can see, the fdisk command provides a lot of functionality. The partitions that you set up may look something
like this configuration in which four partitions have been set up on a single disk /dev/sda.

sda
+------------+------------------------+--------------------+------+
| / 40G | /home 80G | /apps 70G |
swap |
+------------+------------------------+--------------------+------+
sda1 sda2 sda3
sda4

Examining disk space and disk partitions

There are a number of excellent commands for examining disk partitions. The df command is one of the most
commonly used commands for reporting on disk space usage. With the -h option, the df command displays the
measurements in the most "human-friendly" format and that is, in fact, what the h is meant to imply. As you can see
in the example below, the measurements are displayed in kilobytes, megabytes or gigabytes depending on the sizes
rather than all using the same scale.

$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 969M 4.0K 969M 1% /dev
tmpfs 196M 1.1M 195M 1% /run
/dev/sda1 37G 4.5G 31G 13% /
none 4.0K 0 4.0K 0%
/sys/fs/cgroup
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 980M 152K 979M 1% /run/shm
none 100M 36K 100M 1% /run/user
/dev/sda3 28G 44M 26G 1% /apps

The pydf command (think "python df" as it's really a python script) also provides a very useful disk usage display
showing mount points and cute little illustrations for how full each partition is.

$ pydf
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted
on
/dev/sda1 37G 4534M 30G 12.1 [##...........] /
/dev/sda3 27G 44M 26G 0.2 [.............] /apps

The parted command displays partition information in a different format:

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$ sudo parted -l
Model: ATA WDC WD800AAJS-60 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 80.0GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system

Flags
1 1049kB 40.0GB 40.0GB primary ext4
boot
2 40.0GB 50.0GB 10.0GB primary linux-swap(v1)
3 50.0GB 80.0GB 30.0GB primary ext4

The lsblk (list block devices) command illustrates the relationship between disks and their partitions graphically and
also supplies the major and minor device numbers and mount points.

$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE
MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 74.5G 0 disk
sda1 8:1 0 37.3G 0 part /
sda2 8:2 0 9.3G 0 part [SWAP]
sda3 8:3 0 28G 0 part /apps

The fdisk command reports more details on disk partitions and uses very different numbers. You can also use fdisk
to create or delete partitions, list unpartitioned space, change a partition type, or verify the partition table.

$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders, total 156301488 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000f114b

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sda1 * 2048 78125055 39061504 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 78125056 97656831 9765888 82 Linux swap /
Solaris
/dev/sda3 97656832 156301311 29322240 83 Linux

The sfdisk command is similar to fdisk, but makes some partition manipulation activities easier to perform.

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$ sudo sfdisk -l -uM

Disk /dev/sda: 9729 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track

Units = mebibytes of 1048576 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from
0

Device Boot Start End MiB #blocks Id System

/dev/sda1 * 1 38146 38146 39061504 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 38147 47683 9537 9765888 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3 47684 76318 28635 29322240 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty

NOTE: A mebibyte (MiB) = 2 20 bytes or 1,048,576 bytes.

The cfdisk command can also be used to display or manipulate disk partitions.

$ sudo cfdisk

cfdisk (util-linux 2.20.1)

Disk Drive: /dev/sda

Size: 80026361856 bytes, 80.0 GB
Heads: 255 Sectors per Track: 63 Cylinders: 9729

Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size

(MB)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pri/Log Free Space
1.05*
sda1 Boot Primary ext4
39998.99*
sda2 Primary swap
10000.27*
sda3 Primary ext4
30025.98*
Pri/Log Free Space
0.10*

[ Help ] [ New ] [ Print ] [ Quit ] [ Units

]
[ Write ]

Create new partition from free space

Monitoring disk performance

The iostat command can display statistics that illustrate how disks are performing, including how heavily they are
being used. It also displays important measurements that show how busy the CPU is and how much of its resources
are used for types of work. The system described below is idle more then 95% of the time. More importantly for our
focus on disks, the %iowait (CPU waiting on disk IO) is very low. This would not be true if the disk were unusually
busy and disk IO were a bottleneck.
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$ iostat -x 60
Linux 3.13.0-129-generic (stinkbug) 08/31/2017 _x86_64_ (2 CPU)

avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle

0.93 1.15 0.35 1.86 0.00 95.73

Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rkB/s wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz

await r_await w_await svctm %util
sda 8.37 3.26 13.41 2.79 341.14 191.82 65.79
0.61 37.60 30.40 72.14 2.52 4.08

Probably one of the most informative commands for looking at disk health is smartctl (part of smartmontools). While
the command generates a lot of output, it provides valuable measurements that might help you pinpoint disk
problems, particularly once you get used to working with its extensive output.

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