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Sorry if this question is too similar to others, I didn't find anything that helped me.

Following "best practices" I installed my debian with partitions: root, tmp, var and home. Also for the sizes I followed recommendations I read, but after using it for some time it seems for tmp and var I gave too little which gives me problems every now and then.

In order to give more space to var, I decided to symlink /var/cache -> /home/myuser/varcache and then /var/lib -> /home/myuser/varlib. the first seemed to work well, but the second seems to be a bad idea. Actually I see that instead of having /var/lib I have /var/lib/sudo and /var/lib/varlib, which is the actual symlink. Of course some things are not working, so I'm trying to revert it.

Does it make sense that it creates this weird /var/lib/varlib instead of just /var/lib?

Any recommendation on what to do instead?

Would it be a good idea to symlink some folder inside /var/lib instead?

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  • Why put those directories under /home/myuser? They don't belong in a user's home directory, ever. create /home/var, /home/var/lib, /home/var/cache instead. BTW mv+symlink is a method with a long history, people have done what you are doing for decades. because it works. Commented Oct 9, 2015 at 7:38
  • Good point. It was a very bad idea. Afterwards I did it for specific folders inside var and it went better in terms of just gaining space. After this experience I will create a root partition an another for home, but not partitions for var and tmp because it gave me problems running out of space. Commented Oct 14, 2015 at 17:48

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I suspect that it created /var/lib/varlib because you reversed the order of arguments in the ln -s command.

Like almost all unix commands, the order is source followed by destination. ln -s /home/myuser/varlib /var/lib will create a symlink called varlib in /var/lib. ln -s /var/lib /home/myser/varlib will create a symlink called varlib in /home/myuser

Try (as root, in single-user mode so nothing has any files open under /var/lib):

rm -f /var/lib/varlib
mkdir -p /home/var
mv /var/lib /home/var/
ln -s /home/var/lib /var/lib

If you want, you can also move the other symlinked dir out of your home directory (where they really do not belong) and into /home/var:

mv /home/myuser/varcache /home/var/cache
rm -f /var/cache
ln -s /home/var/cache /var/cache
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  • It's a good point. But it was not because of the wrong order. Actually I did it for several folder the same way and it's only for that one that I got this problem. Commented Oct 14, 2015 at 17:47
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If you use LVM, you can increase /var. If not, what will be the biggest folder in /var/lib? Maybe mysql? If so, you should move mysql dir to your /home/myuser/mysql and make symlink.

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