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mikas blog » Blog Archive » ext3 online resizing
OpenFiler 2.4
Hitachi SATA Hard Drives
EXT3 FS resizing is a beautiful thing... Over the weekend I had an issue where I ALMOST lost all of my music and "common" files. Fortunetly with the help of my brilliant girlfriend she reminded me why I'm an IT guy and reminded me that there's different ways to recover from these things.
Long story short I was able to mouth a "backup" of the filesystem on another server and copy it over to a secondary. The scenario is as follows.
Storage1, Storage2, Debian are the "Storage" Servers, both connected to the LAN and SAN.
- Storage1 is an IBM 305 with 4GB of RAM and Dual 500GB HD's and also Dual Gigabit NIC's
- Storage2 is a custom server with a 1.8GHz AMD 64bit CPU and 4GB of RAM, Dual 500GB Hitachi HD's - also with a Single 1Gbit NIC, with 2 PCI Gigabit NIC Addon cards.
- "Debian" is a DC5500 PC connected to the LAN/SAN Networks with seperate NIC's. This System has a 500GB USB Buffalo drive attached as storage.
What had happen is a backup ran this weekend that ended up corrupting the VMK disks for my vmware2 server - this intern had pissed off my DNS and "fileserver". Well when this happen I noticed the DNS server couldn't run simple commands and a few other things. Well things had started to become "wonky" with the fileserver, so in an attempt to "refresh" things. I just blew away the VM's. They weren't important or very hard to reinstall so blowing them away was the best thing.
The other thing I did was figured... since I couldn't access iSCSI features in Openfiler I would just reinstall it on Storage1 -- Doing this was GREAT since it allowed me to retain copies of the data that was already there.
Well, when I rebooted into the new install I noticed it couldn't "mount" the partition that contained the LVM for the data... So I FREAKED.... I lost my mind for a few mins... then my wonderful girlfriend started to remind me of a few things, and I thought... Why can't I just mount the LVM myself?
Well it worked! Now it's mounted and I'm sync'ing it to Storage2 via Rsync... Once this is done I'll correct the issue with the LVM; Blowing it away and then just resync is back to Storage1 via Storage2, once thats complete... I'll reformat "Debian" and name it "Storage3" and set it also to replicate.
Once this is all said and done... I'll have all my main data on Storage1. Have all my backup Data on Storage2 and Storage3 - Storage2 being an "Archival" Server since I can put my HD's in it and it also will allow me to install an iSCSI offloader card along with SCSI interface card for the array in the rack.
