Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2006 15:26:48 -0500 From: Eric Anderson <anderson@centtech.com> To: Lee Damon <nomad@castle.org> Cc: freebsd-geom@freebsd.org Subject: Re: growfs, old disks, gvinum - filesystem expansion and corruption Message-ID: <44CFB908.40904@centtech.com> In-Reply-To: <44CFB4AB.4080803@castle.org> References: <44CFB4AB.4080803@castle.org>
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On 08/01/06 15:08, Lee Damon wrote: > I have several FreeBSD-6.1 based file servers. Each one has a hardware > RAID-based system that presents a single large (800G to 2TB) "disk" to > the OS. > > In looking around for a FBSD-supported method of slicing this disk up > into usable (and later growable) file systems the only thing I found was > gvinum. The other geom commands don't seem to deal with the idea of > slicing off parts of a large drive. > > In a process very similar to the LVM commands I've used on other systems > I set up the boxes, calved off some disk as gvinum "drives", formatted > with newfs -U /dev/gvinum/..., added data and served forth. Then as > file systems filled up I expanded those file systems. When the data was > no longer needed (testing was done, it was time to go production) I > removed those file systems by unmounting them and using rm in the gvinum > command. I then created new file systems and the time has recently come > to expand them. > > Now I discover that gvinum + growfs = Bad Things<tm>. It seems that > when a file system is grown over "old file systems" (that supposedly no > longer exist) and then fsck is run it finds those old file systems and > shoves random stuff (including device nodes in some cases) into the > lost+found directory on the current file system. fsck(8) gives many > complaints about "unexpected soft update inconsistency", unref dir", > bad/dup file", and "allocated frags marked free" & "allocated files > marked free". The rub being when I try to remove the old cruft from > lost+found I run a good probability of triggering a kernel panic. > > My questions are: > 1. Is there any way to clean up the old file system cruft without > crashing/trashing/deleting the system? You could use dd to write zeros over the old areas to wipe out the old filesystem data. Careful! > 2. What tool should I be using to calve off slices of a 'huge' drive and > later expand it? Why not use fdisk/bsdlabel? Eric -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric Anderson Sr. Systems Administrator Centaur Technology Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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