Root Partition Reduction - Sol 9

[slyork]

OK guys, I am going to go looking around for information on this one, but thought I would throw it open to the floor as well. I am sure it will give some of you a morning smile on how badly a system can be built!!

Some of you guys must have had a to dig people out of similar situations ;-)

We have a Solaris 9 server, installed by a "3rd party expert", that has a 36gb root partition!

Now I wish to reduce it (funny that huh!), create seperate /var and /opt partitions.
The one saving grace is that the disk is mirrored.

Pointers to any documentation would be excellent, as would any advice you can offer.

Regards

Steve

 

[bfitzmai]

Steve,
I doubt that you would find any documentation for this one. What you are trying to do isn't easy. The easiest approach would be to just start over. Is the root file system the only files on the 36 Gig mirrored disk? If so,
may-be we can break the mirror and partition the 2nd disk to what you want and transfer the files from the first disk. This way, you will not have to do a fresh install from CD... Either way, you are going to have to boot your server to CD to do this.

 

[cndcadams]

I agree this is not an easy task.
I believe the first step would be to break the mirrors and copy back your original vfstab table if you have one, and also /etc/system. Depending on the Type of Volume manager you should follow their procedure how to unencapsulate boot drives, this usually will tell you what you need to do or not do.

Make sure system boots OS after unencapsulation. Run a df -k so you know how much space is used in each filesystem. Make a backup ufsdump or your choice. You will then need to boot the cdrom into maintenece mode with solaris 9 disk 1 and reformat the drive to sizes required by df -k output taken earlier.

Newfs your partitions, mount and restore partitions, vi /etc/vfstab to reflect the correct paths to each filesystem.

make sure to install new boot block.

Good luck!

CA

 

[gkout]

Backup ur filesystems, break the mirror (with all that this includes) reboot the machine. Repartition the second disk with the sizes u want and restore the backup on the second disk. One thing u should do is install the bootblock on the partition that will be the / partition of the second disk. U cant right away make a / partition on the second disk. U should mount the restored / partitionn of the first disk to another mountpoint. Change vfstab of the second disk after restoring all partitions on it to point to the partitions that will be used. Reboot the box from the new disk. Change whatever needs changes and remirror the disks. BUT DO NOT forget to backup the FIRST disk!!!!
Hope that helps.

 

[slyork]

Thankyou for all the help given so far guys, I will digest and try to make a call on what I am going to do. In the end I could break the mirror and play with the other disk without doing any "real" damage.

This is how it looks at the moment

Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/md/dsk/d0 34180677 17695969 16142902 53% /
/proc 0 0 0 0% /proc
mnttab 0 0 0 0% /etc/mnttab
fd 0 0 0 0% /dev/fd
swap 6487832 104 6487728 1% /var/run
swap 6488216 488 6487728 1% /tmp
/dev/dsk/c4t0d1s6 70020862 21985969 47334685 32% /data
/dev/dsk/c4t0d2s6 35004073 1804533 32849500 6% /xxx
/dev/dsk/c4t0d3s6 34738244 10293199 24097663 30% /www
/dev/dsk/c4t0d0s6 17250638 8397713 8680419 50% /yyy
/dev/dsk/c4t0d4s6 34738244 7024938 27365924 21% /zzz
/dev/md/dsk/d37 32267013 15927318 16017025 50% /space


As you can see the O/S is seperate from the data (which is on a SAN) (root is only temporarily at 53%, normally sits at 6%, we needed to shuffle some data!)

Here's another query for you... This server is still on the base release of Solaris 9, would you patch it up to current recommended first, let it settle down and then try and re-work the disk's?

Again many thanks people

Steve

 

[gkout]

You can do the patching now and is best to do it before you re-mirror the disks. Though you should check any conflicts with your existing applications or database. You can try to download explorer from

http://sunsolve.sun.com

and run it to gother information on the patches recommended for you environment.

George

 

[slyork]

Thanks for the reply George,
I've got the patches in hand (I hope) was able to get hold of the patchck.pl script and run it against the latest patchdiag.xref file, but have also installed and run explorer so I can see what is actually installed on the server.
I think I will patch the box before I try to sort out the partitions, at least then I will have eliminated any problems that could arise that have been patched since release version.
Again thanks for all the input guys

Steve