questions on Sun disk partitions

[FRANCO at BODES1.CINECA.IT]

In our Dept. of Electronics we got a couple of new Suns. I installed them
carefully choosing a partition scheme: I sized /usr (mounted on filesystem
/dev/sd0g as Sun suggests) so that it is almost full when all the /usr
software is installed (e.g. Fortran, DNI, etc...); in this way I try to
waste as less disk space as possible and I get /home as big as possible
(disk space is never enough :-).  So now comes the problem: I got MIT
X-Windows and I had to install it but, since /usr was already full, I had
to set some symbolic links for /usr/bin/X11 /usr/lib/X11 and
/usr/lib/libX...a to have the real files contained in /home. Since this
approach looks rather complex to me (I never know where my files really
are, and if I'll need to install some other software, the whole setup is
going to become a mess...), I have some questions:

1- Is it possible to dinamically change disk partitions, without having to
format it? In this case, which data would be lost, if any?

2- Did anybody out there tried to have just one big partition (big as the
whole disk), or maybe two partitions (the first for swap and the second
for all the remaining files) so that / /usr /home are in that partition?

3- In the above case, is there any drawback (slower perfarmance, waste in
disk space, troubles in Sun standard installation software, maximum number
of inodes, etc)?

4- Is there any reason for Suns to have partitions?

If you think the question is of any interest in sun-spots, please reply
there. If not, send E-mail direcly to me, and I'll summarize everything in
sun-spots. Many thanks in advance.

Franco Venturi - Dept. of Electronics - University of Bologna - Italy
E-mail franco at bodes1.cineca.it
       franco%bodes1.cineca.it at icineca2.bitnet