Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2008 19:57:55 -0400 From: "Donald E. Holt" <donald.holt@earthlink.net> To: Lee Dilkie <Lee@dilkie.com> Cc: GEOM Mailing List <freebsd-geom@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Striped Drive for OS File System Message-ID: <1206316676.33903.20.camel@Hank.bullhouse.net> In-Reply-To: <47E6E34B.6000107@dilkie.com> References: <1206284676.2073.28.camel@Hank.bullhouse.net> <47E6E34B.6000107@dilkie.com>
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Lee, thanks so much for the great info. I may still bollix things up, but at least I know that the operation itself isn't doomed from the start... The man pages seem to be thorough, so I believe I can work out the precise steps there. I do have two remaining questions, if I may beg your patience. I am able to backup /usr to tape. In light of that fact, would you recommend gstripe? I should do a bit more research on my own concerning the differences between gstripe and gconcat prepared drives, I know, but I'd value your advice. Second question. The drive that currently contains /usr also has a swap partition (in addition to the swap partition on the first SCSI drive). I assume the second swap isn't absolutely necessary, but would it be worthwhile (or possible) to designate a portion of the concatenated space to swap? Thanks again! On Sun, 2008-03-23 at 19:10 -0400, Lee Dilkie wrote: > Donald, > > Yes, it can be done but as a gconcat rather than a gstripe if you need > to expand in place. > > essentially, > > unmount /usr > create gconcat from existing /usr and new drive (use raw drive.). > then use growfs to expand gconcatted drive > mount gconcatted version of /usr > > If you can do a backup and restore of /usr, you could create a stripped > drive instead (if they are the same size or thereabouts). > > The only gotcha that I had was in FreeBSD 5.5. Growfs doesn't handle > really big disks (which is what you get here). I found that the patch to > fix growfs in 6.2 and manually did it and rebuilt growfs and it worked > great. I've done it twice now, adding a third drive to my gconcat array. > > Also. I only used gconcat with the raw drives, ie "gconcat label > big_drive /dev/ad2 /dev/ad3 /dev/ad4" but I presume it works the same > with slices/partitions. > > -lee > > Donald E. Holt wrote: > > I haven't seen this particular situation discussed, nor have I been able > > to find any specific information on the web. I am not experienced in > > GEOM or vinum, so I may be asking a dumb question. If so, I apologize. > > > > My system has FreeBSD installed across 2 SCSI drives. /dev/da2 > > holds /, /tmp, /var, and a swap. /dev/da4 is devoted to /usr and another > > swap. A third drive (dev/da5) is dedicated to a Win4BSD virtual machine, > > and is mounted as /WinXP (there are still a few MS apps I can't get > > around using). > > > > I'd like to expand /usr fs to an additional SCSI drive (physically > > present now, but unused). Would it be possible to do that, perhaps with > > gstripe, without distroying data on the current drive? > > > > Again, sorry if I've asked one of those eye-rolling, forehead-thumping > > questions. > > > > Thanks! > > _______________________________________________ > > freebsd-geom@freebsd.org mailing list > > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-geom > > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-geom-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" > >
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