Category: Linux

Resizing Linux Virtual Machine Disks

This article will show how to grow a partition on your Linux partition to fill the entire disk using growpart. This is useful if you have resized a virtual machine disk, or moved to a larger disk on your desktop or laptop Linux system.

Step 1: Listing and Identifying Storage Devices

To expand the filesystem on your resized disk, you’ll need to first locate the disk using the lsblk command, execute it by running:

lsblk

And you will see output similar to the following listing storage devices and the partitions on them:

Above, you can see that disk sda has a size of 50 gigabytes, but that the volume containing the root partition (sda3) is only 29.5 gigabytes – there is unused space on the storage device.

There may be multiple entries in the output from lsblk – you’ll need to identify the disk you have resized by the size and utilization – it should be apparent which disk has unused space. Usually on single-disk machines, the first and only storage device will be named sda.

You will also need to know the name of the partition your wish to grow – in this case sda3 – usually identified by it having the root mount point of /.

Step 2: Installing growpart

growpart is a utility that makes it super easy to grow a partition. It’s part of the cloud-guest-utils package. Note that while this package is intended to work on cloud-hosted virtual machines, the growpart utility also works just fine on physical machines.

On Debian and Ubuntu, run:

sudo apt install cloud-guest-utils

On Arch, run:

pacman install cloud-guest-utils

On RedHat, run:

yum install cloud-utils-growpart -y

Step 3: Grow your Partition

Once growpart is available, growing a partition to use the entire remaining disk space is as simple as running:

sudo growpart /dev/sda 3

You’ll need to specify the correct partition name above, replaceing sda 3 (note the space! the device and partition number are separated when using growpart) if necessary. growpart is executed with no additional parameters – if the size parameter is not specified, it will default to the available size of the partition.

Now that the partition has been expanded, the file system must be also using resize2fs:

sudo resize2fs /dev/sda3

Note that the space has disappeared in the device path again.

You will see output similar to:

Confirming the change. Once this final step is done, reboot:

sudo reboot

If using systemd-resolved as your DNS resolver (i.e. the hosts line of your /etc/nsswitch.conf file includes the word resolve and/or /etc/resolv.conf contains the line nameserver 127.0.0.53), then this command will flush its cache:

sudo systemd-resolve --flush-caches

A newer version of this command seems to be:

sudo resolvectl flush-caches

You can use FFmpeg (a free command-line tool for Mac, Linux and Windows) to encode WMV to MP4. Here is an example syntax:

ffmpeg -i input.wmv -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -c:a aac -q:a 100 output.mp4

This will encode the video to H.264 video and AAC audio, using the default quality. To change the quality for the video, use a different CRF value, where lower means better, e.g. 20 or 18. For audio, 100% is the default quality. Increase the value for better quality.

For the AppleTV specifically, this is what Apple says it supports:

H.264 video up to 1080p, 30 frames per second, High or Main Profile level 4.0 or lower, Baseline profile level 3.0 or lower with AAC-LC audio up to 160 kbit/s per channel, 48 kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats

So, you could use the following command to force the 30 Hz frame rate and High profile:

ffmpeg -i input.wmv -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -profile:v high -r 30 -c:a aac -q:a 100 -ar 48000 output.mp4

To use L2TP VPN connections on Linux Mint you need to install this packages:

sudo apt-get install network-manager-l2tp network-manager-l2tp-gnome

All the components of the LAMP server are available to install using the default system repository of Ubuntu. Hence, we can configure the environment without adding an extra repository. However, before moving forward, just run the system update command to ensure the system rebuilds the APT package index cache.

sudo apt update

Install Lamp server

We can install LAMP server components one by one on our Ubuntu system. However, it is a time-consuming process, hence to make it short here we are using a single command. That will not only install the LAMP server but also enable and start all the required services.

sudo apt install lamp-server^ php

The above command will select all the required packages to set up Apache, MySQL, and PHP on your system.

Uninstall the LAMP Server

Well, when it comes to uninstalling the LAMP server completely from your Ubuntu system, we can use the given command:

sudo apt autoremove --purge apache2* mysql-server* php*