Lab
A Cloud Guru

Managing Swap Files and Partitions

Managing swap files and partitions may be a necessary system administration task, if our system ever runs low on memory. In this activity, we will be creating a swap partition and a swap file. We will also be looking at activating and deactivating swap space, viewing swap usage, and making swap space available persistently. At the conclusion, we will understand how to work with swap files and partitions when needed to augment system memory.

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Path Info

Level

Intermediate

Duration

30m

Published

Jan 17, 2020

Challenge

Create a Persistent 1 GB Swap Partition
Using fdisk, create the swap partition:
```
sudo -i
fdisk /dev/xvdg
```
Press the following to create the partition:
- n for new partition
- Enter to select the default (primary) type
- Enter for the default first sector
- +1G for the size of the partition
- t to change the type
- L to list the types
- 82 for Linux Swap
- w to write changes and quit
Execute mkswap to format the partition:
```
mkswap /dev/xvdg1
```
Add an entry to /etc/fstab:
```
/dev/xvdg1   none     swap    defaults        0 0
```
Verify swap partition is activated:
```
swapon -s
swapon -a
swapon -s
```
Challenge

Create a Persistent 512 MB Swap File
Use the dd command to create a 512 MB /root/extra.swp file:
```
dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/extra.swp bs=1M count=512
```
Format and activate the /root/extra.swap by executing mkswap:
```
mkswap /root/extra.swp
swapon /root/extra.swp
```
Set more secure 0600 permissions using the chmod command:
```
chmod 0600  /root/extra.swp
ls -l /root/extra.swp
```
Add an entry to /etc/fstab to activate the swap file:
```
/root/extra.swp none swap defaults 0 0
```
Activate the swap file entry:
```
swapoff /root/extra.swp
swapon -a
swapon -s
```

Author

A Cloud Guru

The Cloud Content team comprises subject matter experts hyper focused on services offered by the leading cloud vendors (AWS, GCP, and Azure), as well as cloud-related technologies such as Linux and DevOps. The team is thrilled to share their knowledge to help you build modern tech solutions from the ground up, secure and optimize your environments, and so much more!

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