Chris Osicki schrieb:
Hi
I apologize in advance for asking a question not really appropriate
for this mailing list, but I couldn't find a better place with lots of
people managing lots of disk space.
The question:
Has anyone of you been using ext2online to resize (large) ext3 filesystems?
I have to do it going from 500GB to 1TB on a productive system I was
wondering if you have some horror/success stories.
I'm using RHEL4/U4 (kernel 2.6.9) on this system.
Yes, I tried to online resize a similar filesystem (600 MB to 1.2 TB)
and it didn't work.
At some point, resize2fs would just exit with errors.
I tried to do it several times before I figured out what's missing;
sometimes, I interrupted the process with ctrl+c. No data loss occurred.
To do an online ext3 resize, the filesystem needs a "resize_inode"
feature. You can check the features with dumpe2fs:
# dumpe2fs -h /dev/sda1
(...)
Filesystem features: has_journal resize_inode dir_index filetype
needs_recovery sparse_super large_file
(...)
This flag is added by default only in the recent versions of e2progs
(1.39 and later AFAIR); before, it had to be specified manually. So with
RHEL4, you may be out of luck.
In the end, I had to to an offline resize.
I had this volume mirrored on another machine, so I didn't worry that
much though.
Also, to resize a filesystem of that size you would need plenty of RAM
(if you have about 1 GB RAM free, it should be just enough; otherwise,
your machine will be swapping, and the process will take longer).
Before, I tried to resize it on a machine with 256 MB and several
snapshots; resize2fs was killed because of OOM, and still, no data loss.
If you have that an old kernel, take care if you're using snapshots; I
believe they are stable only as of 2.6.22 (before 2.6.22 snapshots
needed a lot of RAM; before 2.6.18 there were problems with snapshots
removing etc.).
Would be good to add some of that info to LVM HOWTO.
--
Tomasz Chmielewski
http://wpkg.org
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