[rhelv6-beta-list] My first experiences with RHEL6 beta

[John Summerfield]

Lamar Owen wrote:
> [Tried off-list, but, I had forgotten the admonition in John's tagline...
> On Wednesday, June 16, 2010 07:37:05 am John Summerfield wrote:
>> Brobald Vincent (DTSBE) wrote:
>>> Can be done online without any downtime (just an impact on
>>> performances).
>  
>> I think you people are not listening. "That box" over there has space in 
>> its case for precisely one disk. The HP DC7700 SFF I'm typing this on 
>> accommodates two, provided that I don't have a floppy (I do not) or a 
>> card reader (would be handy), and it has two.
> 
> Good to hear you again, John.

You too!

> 
> John, when I decided to upgrade my laptop's (Dell Precision M65) hard drive from a 200GB to a 500GB unit, I leveraged LVM to make the process happen with much less downtime.  
> 
> Here's what I did, after making an rsync backup of my data.
> 
> I set up an external drive dock (Thermaltake BlacX) that can do eSATA or USB, and put the new drive in it.  Since I have an expresscard eSATA interface, I hotplugged the expresscard, hotplugged the drive dock's eSATA cable, partitioned the new drive, copied the boot sector, did the pvcreate/vgextend/pvmove dance, and kept working while my data was being copied.  Takes a long time to copy an nearly full 200GB drive, even over eSATA, but I started it in the morning when I came in to work, and it was done by time to leave.  
> 
> Once the pvmove completed, I could easily see, using the expresscard's activity LED, that I was now working off the external (I did issue a swapoff first, incidentally), and removed the internal from the volume group.  Shutdown, change drives out, reboot.
> 
> Rather than several hours without my laptop while waiting on dd, I was five minutes without my laptop; that's how long it took to power it down, take out the 200, and put in the 500.  And with a full data backup, I was comfortable doing that.
> 
> Booted right up; did a resize on the live filesystem, and kept on trucking.
> 
> I'll be honest; I did it mostly just to see if it could be done, and it worked.  Now that I know that, I have much less use for partition copying and resizing utilities than I used to, at least for my personal boxes.  And since my Dell M65 is my primary box, I understand the deal with only one drive in the box.  I just prefer to not let the box sit for hours doing nothing but copying when I could be doing something useful with it.


I would simply schedule it to run overnight. I don't do this sort of 
thing very often, and sometimes it's unplanned (dodgy disk, someone 
else's system etc) and sometimes it's a Windows box anyway.

By the time I researched how to do it the way you did, and satisfied 
myself it really is safe to continue to work on the box, could have done 
it already. Unless I was recovering from a dodgy disk, but that's never 
easy or quick

I might have to learn about GPT, but then maybe not: I expect to retire 
from all this at years' end and go off to play chess, make wooden 
objects and catch fish.


-- 

Cheers
John

-- spambait
1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu
-- Advice
http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

You cannot reply off-list:-)