Re: growfs - Using on mounten FS - planned?

--On Mittwoch, 27. Oktober 2004 20:14 Uhr +0200 Oliver Lehmann <lehmann_at_ans-netz.de> wrote:

> Kris Kennaway wrote:
>> On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 07:45:51PM +0200, Oliver Lehmann wrote:
>> >
>> > But now I read growfs(8), and it is only possible to grow an unmounted
>> > filesystem which is bad for /usr (for example), and not nice at all.
>> > Are there any plans to make it work with mounted Filesystems?
>>
>> I don't think so; do it from single-user mode instead.  Also note that
>> you can only grow into contiguous space, so if you have multiple
>> filesystems on the disk that you want to grow later, you have to
>> preallocate space in which to grow them (i.e. space them apart on the
>> disk) -- so you might as well just allocate the space to the FS to
>> begin with.
>
> I thought it would be as easy as it is with AIXs LVM. :)

I got used to manage the disk space via vinum volumes. If a filesystem
has to grow, I just add concat plex to the vinum volume underlying the
filesystem. After that I use growfs.

I admit that I have not done this under a recent 5.x or -current with
g_vinum and/or UFS2. But I'm very used to this procedure on my produc-
tioin servers running 4-stable.

Ok, ... there's still the "problem" that one has to do this during
pre-scheduled maintenance windows very early in the morning.

> (just grow if your vg has free space, and by having it still mounted,
> and don't care about "where" the free space is)

Using vinum you won't have to.


> Because I liked the idea having free diskspace up one's sleeve which you
> can assign later, or for a new partition or sth. like that.
> But it looks like i should drop that thing.

I'll have to test this on gvinum / UFS2 during the next few weeks,
because of a 2 TByte storage server running 5.3 has to go in pro-
duction in early December.

-Andreas