Bug 150003

Summary: e2fsprogs has missing ext2prepare(8) and e2fsadm(8)
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Reporter: Milan Kerslager <milan.kerslager>
Component: e2fsprogsAssignee: Thomas Woerner <twoerner>
Status: CLOSED ERRATA QA Contact: Jay Turner <jturner>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 4.0CC: agk, joshua, k.georgiou, sct, srevivo, tao
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OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2005-06-20 09:46:56 UTC Type: ---
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Description Milan Kerslager 2005-03-01 15:33:04 UTC
As of ext2online(8) there should be a program ext2prepare(8) and e2fsadm(8) to
do some preparation work on unmounted FS to go over size limits.

Tha package in the up-to-date initial version of RHEL4 has no ext2prepare and no
e2fsadm at all. This limits ext2online usage.

Comment 1 Milan Kerslager 2005-03-01 16:05:15 UTC
When trying to shink unmouted ext3 FS on top of LVM, the ext2online utility
refuses to work because device mapper:

# df -B 4096 /dev/md0
Filesystem  4K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/dm-0   278252736 213526856  59158761  79% /home/glftpd/glftpd/site
# umount /dev/dm-0
# ext2online /dev/dm-0 260000000
ext2online v1.1.18 - 2001/03/18 for EXT2FS 0.5b
ext2online: can't find /dev/dm-0, is it mounted?

I'm unable to shrink mounted FS too. As of the man page this is impossible though:

# mount /dev/dm-0
# ext2online /dev/dm-0 260000000
ext2online v1.1.18 - 2001/03/18 for EXT2FS 0.5b
ext2online: /dev/dm-0 has 278355968 blocks cannot shrink to 260000000

It seems that This is a wrong (TM) because we are unable to shink the FS to be
able to remove broken HDD. We will try to use rescue disc with RHEL3 and with
resize2fs

Comment 2 Stephen Tweedie 2005-03-01 16:35:01 UTC
The ext2prepare code is currently ready only for "old-style" ext2/3 online
resize.  The final upstream format changed slightly and the tool has not yet
been updated for that.  It is planned to introduce it upstream in the future.

Online shrinking will not be supported in RHEL4; it is uncertain whether it will
ever be supported by ext2/3, as shrinking requires the ability to dynamically
reallocate inodes and data that are currently located on the bits of the disk
that you're about to lose.

Dealing with a broken HDD should be possible via LVM, which allows you to add a
new disk, migrate the data dynamically from one disk to the other, and then
remove the failed one.  This needs no filesystem support.


Comment 3 Stephen Tweedie 2005-03-01 16:37:09 UTC
# umount /dev/dm-0
# ext2online /dev/dm-0 260000000
ext2online v1.1.18 - 2001/03/18 for EXT2FS 0.5b
ext2online: can't find /dev/dm-0, is it mounted?

This is never expected to work, even for growing --- online resize is for online
filesystems, you do not expect it to run on offline [unmounted] volumes!

Comment 4 Milan Kerslager 2005-03-01 23:34:41 UTC
Sorry, I read the man page for ext2online(8) in the wrong way. There is a
sentence about growing and shrinking with ext2resize(8) which is not in the
package and I wrongly tryed ext2online.

So RFE is to include ext2resize if possible in this package.

Comment 5 Stephen Tweedie 2005-03-01 23:39:51 UTC
The reason ext2resize is disabled is because the version available for RHEL4 was
discovered, at the last moment, to be incompatible with the new online resize
code.  That has since been fixed and ext2resize is scheduled to be in RHEL4
update 1.


Comment 6 Milan Kerslager 2005-03-01 23:47:06 UTC
This is great! We added new disc and we used pvmove to handle our problem.

Comment 7 Milan Kerslager 2005-03-04 22:39:31 UTC
Is there a testing package somewhere? I would like to test it if possible.

Comment 8 Thomas Woerner 2005-05-11 12:28:08 UTC
The fix is in U1.