[linux-lvm] online resize

[Jan-Benedict Glaw]

On Sun, 2006-03-26 05:36:59 -0600, Zac Slade <krakrjak at volumehost.net> wrote:
> On Sunday 26 March 2006 04:26, Luca Berra wrote:
> > if you have any horror story, please share it, it will surely help other
> > users out there.
> Distribution: Gentoo
> Data: /home
> Target: Resize from 1GiB to 800MiB (plenty of free space)
> Filesystem: ext3
> Method: ext2resize with kernel patches and latest e2fsprogs
> 
> Unmount /home in single user mode.  Resize using ext resizing utilities and 
> spend the next 12 hours recovering inodes with fsck only to find a few 
> hundred megs of data in /home/lost+found (with nonsensical names) and 
> swearing off ext3 for mission critical data.

Nice story, but as a bug report, this is mostly useless:

  * After umount, did you run an e2fsck -f?

  * Do you have a script(1) log of the whole session? (You'd probably
    have this started as a last resort log then you started the
    fsck'ing after the resize.)

  * What exactly is "ext resizing utilities"? Did you save a copy of
    it (incl. sources to find out about additionally applied patches?)

  * These nonsensical names you refer to are the file's inode numbers,
    in decimal. For mission-critical systems, it's wise to regularly
    get inode listings with filenames. Did you compare those inode
    numbers with your backups?

  * Did you prepare an image-backup of your 1GB container beforehand?
    Helps for easy recovery as well as error reproduction (esp.
    because 1GB isn't all that hard to store on one CD when there's
    plenty of free space, which can be made to compress very well.)

MfG, JBG

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