Backup, do a fresh install with new partitions, restore. You have to do this every once in a while especially if your partition sizing is from nearly a decade ago.

My one complaint about OpenBSD would probably be lack of resizable partitions. You can expand them, but only if you have free contiguous space and most of the time one partition starts where the prior one ends. It's rarely a problem in practice, as only /home and /var and maybe /usr/local tend to be subject to any guesswork, but it can bite you from time to time as in your case.

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hedora 6 hours ago | parent [-]

My point is that you shouldn't have to do this!

I've already done this twice for this box. Its disk is half empty, and the used space is 75% compounding useless bloat:

- 50% of the used space are package sets I never asked for.

- The stuff I did ask for is somehow 2x larger than it needs to be, since they don't randomize binaries in place.

- If they'd actually follow their own filesystem hierarchy standards, and stop using /usr as a build target (very bad things will happen if a crash happens in the middle of that! Why are we making lots of small separate partitions again?!?) then I could just make /var big. Then I would not have to repartition yet again after they introduce /lib/lolz/3gib or whatever in 2027.

Alternatively, if they had a journalling filesystem or still supported soft updates, then I could have one big partition, which would solve it once and for all.

Anyway, I'd argue "take the lan offline, backup the router, repartition and restore" isn't a planned reasonable maintenance task for a router. The fact that its so obviously easily avoidable is really frustrating.

Alternatively, if they just had a "which sets to install?" config option for auto-update (like they do for the OS installer!) then I wouldn't have to do this.

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SoftTalker 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah it sucks when partitions that were sized 8-10 years ago are no longer adequate. I've hit the "/usr is too small to complete an upgrade" trap myself. When that happened I rejected the installer's partition suggestions and made /usr substantially larger (this is also necessary if you're going to be building large ports, which also happens under /usr).

So far that has worked for me.

Some people would also argue that using an 8 year old device as a critical path in your LAN is a risk in itself. Taking routers down to do upgrades is pretty common in the enterprise IT world.

	▲	hedora 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It’s not just the partition sizing though. The lack of DDNS and clock re-sync are really painful. Similarly, if fsck -y is frequently required, maybe just run that way all the time instead of failing to boot, or fix the root problem. I doubt many sers are taking block level backups for forensic repair in case they need to hand assemble inodes. Anyway, I wish them well. I want a simple, correct and rock solid OS for this sort of use case. The three pillars of computer security are confidentiality, integrity and availability. Hopefully they’ll focus a bit more on the latter two things than they have recently.