Almost Out Of Free Space
One of Zymeta’s servers is almost out of free hard drive space. It’s hard to believe that we can fill up an 80 GB hard drive but we have. So we’re moving up to 200 GB of space, and when we fill that up it will be time to replace the development server anyway. The problem is that there’s no easy way (it seems) to muck around with our current software-based RAID-1 array. In theory you can resize some file systems on the fly, but things get much more complicated when your filesystem sits on top of RAID.
While I realize that there are ways around the problems, such as creating a new RAID partition and then copying over all the files, I am trying to minimize downtime. In an ideal situation, the server would only be down as long as it takes to shutdown the machine, swap a drive and boot up the machine again. In an even better world, we’d have hot swapable SCSI drives. Then once the drive was swapped, I could sync up the array onto the new drive, do the same for a second drive and then resize the filesystem.
Unfortunately, the RAID system is smarter than I am an although I resized the physical hard drive partition, it won’t let me increase the filesystem size, even if I unmount it. So, I’ve given in or given up; not sure which. In any case, the slick, minimal downtime route isn’t going to happen.
Update: We’ve decided to simply leave the current partitions as is and create new partitions on the larger drive as required and simply mount those to various points on the root filesystem requiring more space. It should work fine, will cause me far less grief, the caveat being that it won’t be nearly as slick and as seemless as resizing the filesystem would have been.
Mon, 15 Aug 2005 21:17 Posted in General
