Hello All- I regularly increase the size of volumes using "add-brick" followed by "rebalance VOLNAME fix-layout". I usually allow normal use of an expanded volume (i.e reading and writing files) to continue while "fix-layout" is taking place, and I have not experienced any apparent problems as a result. The documentation does not say that volumes cannot be used during "fix-layout" after "add-brick", but I would like to know for certain that this practice is safe. I have a similar question about using volumes during"fix-layout" after "remove-brick"; is this a safe thing to do? Being cautious I assume not, but it would be very useful to know if files can actually be safely written to a volume in this situation. This weekend I had to shrink a volume using "remove-brick", and I am currently waiting for "fix-layout" to complete before copying the files from the removed brick into the shrunk volume. The problem is that there are 2.5TB of data to copy, but fix-layout is still going after two days. I was banking on completing the shrinking operation over the weekend and making the volume available for use again on Monday morning. Therefore I would really like to know if I can start the copy now while fix-layout is still going on. Incidentally, is there a way to estimate how long fix-layout will take for a particular volume? I don't understand why fix-layout is taking so long for my shrunk volume. According to the master_list.txt file I created recently during the GFID error fixing process, the volume in question has ~1.2 million paths, but "fix-layout VOLNAME status" shows that twice this number of layouts have been fixed already. Regards Dan. -- Mr. D.A. Bretherton Computer System Manager Environmental Systems Science Centre Harry Pitt Building 3 Earley Gate University of Reading Reading, RG6 6AL UK Tel. +44 118 378 5205 Fax: +44 118 378 6413
