[rhelv6-beta-list] My first experiences with RHEL6 beta

[Lamar Owen]

[Tried off-list, but, I had forgotten the admonition in John's tagline...
On Wednesday, June 16, 2010 07:37:05 am John Summerfield wrote:
> Brobald Vincent (DTSBE) wrote:
> > Can be done online without any downtime (just an impact on
> > performances).
 
> I think you people are not listening. "That box" over there has space in 
> its case for precisely one disk. The HP DC7700 SFF I'm typing this on 
> accommodates two, provided that I don't have a floppy (I do not) or a 
> card reader (would be handy), and it has two.

Good to hear you again, John.

John, when I decided to upgrade my laptop's (Dell Precision M65) hard drive from a 200GB to a 500GB unit, I leveraged LVM to make the process happen with much less downtime.  

Here's what I did, after making an rsync backup of my data.

I set up an external drive dock (Thermaltake BlacX) that can do eSATA or USB, and put the new drive in it.  Since I have an expresscard eSATA interface, I hotplugged the expresscard, hotplugged the drive dock's eSATA cable, partitioned the new drive, copied the boot sector, did the pvcreate/vgextend/pvmove dance, and kept working while my data was being copied.  Takes a long time to copy an nearly full 200GB drive, even over eSATA, but I started it in the morning when I came in to work, and it was done by time to leave.  

Once the pvmove completed, I could easily see, using the expresscard's activity LED, that I was now working off the external (I did issue a swapoff first, incidentally), and removed the internal from the volume group.  Shutdown, change drives out, reboot.

Rather than several hours without my laptop while waiting on dd, I was five minutes without my laptop; that's how long it took to power it down, take out the 200, and put in the 500.  And with a full data backup, I was comfortable doing that.

Booted right up; did a resize on the live filesystem, and kept on trucking.

I'll be honest; I did it mostly just to see if it could be done, and it worked.  Now that I know that, I have much less use for partition copying and resizing utilities than I used to, at least for my personal boxes.  And since my Dell M65 is my primary box, I understand the deal with only one drive in the box.  I just prefer to not let the box sit for hours doing nothing but copying when I could be doing something useful with it.