growfs questions


 
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Operating Systems Solaris growfs questions
# 1  
Old 02-10-2006
growfs questions

I have a pretty old Sun box (Ultra2 to be specific) with an A1000 storage attached. It's running Solaris 2.6 and has DiskSuite 4.2 installed. There's a filesystem that's almost out of disk space, and I have a free LUN on the A1000 that I can use to expand it by creating a concatenation. I've never done this before, but the procedure in DiskSuite manual seems straight-forward. However, I have a couple of questions:

1. Will this work on Solaris 2.6 with DiskSuite 4.2? Especially the growfs part? Is there anything I should watch out for, considering I have such old software versions?

2. How long time the growfs might take? I'm expanding 72 GB partition to double the size.

3. What are my chances of failure/losing data? Just trying to get an idea. I do have a backup.

Any other suggestions/recommendations will be very helpful! Thanks in advance!
# 2  
Old 02-10-2006
1. Why wouldn't it work (growfs)? Just make sure the space isn't already used (raw devices being used by a Oracle/Sybase/other product) - as long as the space isn't used by something else, you shouldn't have any issues otherwise.

2. No clue (that was helpful, wasn't it). I think it's the same amount of time it takes to newfs a new 72GB filesystem (again, really helpful info here)

3. Very doubtful you would lose anything - growfs automatically locks the filesystem so no writes can happen while it working. From the 4.2 docs:
Quote:
The growfs(1M) command will "write-lock" (see lockfs(1M)) a mounted file system when expanding. The length of time the file system is write-locked can be shortened by expanding the file system in stages. For instance, to expand a 1 Gbyte file system to 2 Gbytes, the file system can be grown in 16 Mbyte stages using the -s option to specify the total size of the new file system at each stage.

During the expansion, the file system is not available for write access because of write-lock. Write accesses are transparently suspended and are restarted when growfs(1M) unlocks the file system. Read accesses are not affected, though access times are not kept while the lock is in effect.
# 3  
Old 02-13-2006
Quote:
Originally Posted by RTM
1. Why wouldn't it work (growfs)? Just make sure the space isn't already used (raw devices being used by a Oracle/Sybase/other product) - as long as the space isn't used by something else, you shouldn't have any issues otherwise.
Thanks - already checked, it doesn't seem that we're using any database s/w on that box that would use a raw disk partition.

I'm just being a bit uncomfortable since everything on that box is such an old version, even the DiskSuite is ancient... hopefully it will work Smilie
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