[SATLUG] Partition tools

[Al Castanoli]

Apologies for jumping in late on this discussion - I just got out of the
hospital, and Santa Rosa Northwest didn't provide an access point.

Oddly enough, this topic was touched upon by the IBM Linux Technology
Center's Mingming Cao. Theodore T'So [1] et al in a paper they delivered
at the 2005 Ottawa Linux Symposium last month.

http://ext2.sourceforge.net/2005-ols/2005-ext3-paper.pdf

The online filesystem resizing tools are described beginning on page 6.

The long and short of this is online partition resizing has been part of
the ext2 and ext3 filesystems since kernel 2.6.10, but is not native to
several "boxed" kernels, such as the RHEL 4 standard kernels (although
it is included with the Fedora 4 and Scientific Linux 4 kernels).

For those RedHat users who are interested, this month's Red Hat Magazine
states:

"Online resizing support for ext3 hit the mainline kernel in 2.6.10 last
November or thereabouts. The tools to take advantage of this support are
in e2fsprogs 1.36.

None of this code is in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (kernel 2.6.9 and
e2fsprogs 1.35), but all of it is in Fedora Core 4 (kernel 2.6.11 and
e2fsprogs 1.37)."

I'm running SuSE 9.3 pro on shoebox here, and noted one of the authors
of that paper is also one of the e2fsprogs authors:

[1] afcasta at shoebox:~> rpm -q e2fsprogs; rpm -qi e2fsprogs | tail -5
    e2fsprogs-1.36-5
    Authors:
    --------
    Remy Card <card at masi.ibp.fr>
    Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu>
    Distribution: SuSE Linux 9.3 (i586)

-- 
Al Castanoli


On Thu, 2005-08-18 at 20:30 -0500, Bruce Dubbs wrote:
> Chuck wrote:
> 
> > Anybody have any ideas on how to resize (larger) this ext3 partition???
> 
> Well you could convert it to an ext2
> 
> # umount /dev/hda10
> # tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/hda10
> # e2fsck /dev/hda10
> # Edit /etc/fstab to change /dev/hda10 to mount type ext2
> # mount /dev/hda10
> 
> 
> And back to an ext3
> 
> # umount /dev/hda10
> # tune2fs -j /dev/hda10
> # Edit /etc/fstab, and for /dev/hda10, change ext2 to ext3
> # mount /dev/hda10
> 
>   -- Bruce