[clug] trouble unmounting /var on production system

[Martijn van Oosterhout]

On Sat, May 13, 2006 at 10:55:23PM +1000, Tony and Robyn Lewis wrote:
> We have a box in a colo.  Filesystems are ext3 over LVM over RAID5.  
> We've reached the point where we need to resize and increase /var, and 
> we'd rather not pay access fees to sit at the box.
> 
> Because it's ext3, I need to unmount the partition to resize it (BTW, 
> did you know you can resize reiser partitions while they're mounted?  
> Points awarded to reiser), but I can't unmount it.

There are patches to allow this for ext2 but I don't think they've been
integrated.

In any case, things that have caught me before:

- You're in the filesystem while trying to unmount it
- There's another filesystem mounted on /var/something, you have to
unmount that first.

BTW, something I sometimes did was remount the filesystem read-only. It
may not be 100% safe, but it will stop the kernel writing stuff to the
filesystem while you're resizing it.

If you have the filesystem readonly, resize it and then reboot you
should be fine.

Hope this helps,
-- 
Martijn van Oosterhout   <kleptog at svana.org>   http://svana.org/kleptog/
> From each according to his ability. To each according to his ability to litigate.
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