Creating /home partition on existing server without reformatting and adding new Disks
Hello,
We have a server with two disks (2 Disks) of 300 GB each, configured as RAID 1 (hardware raid). The vendor created default partitions and did not create /home partition while installing RHEL 7.2. When we asked them to create /home so that we can give quotas to users , they said they need another two disks and can not use gparted to create new partition as it is RAID 1.
Our question is there a way to create /home with adding disks or reformating disks. ? can Virtual file systems be used?
Responses
Red Hat
Guru
7257 points
You could create a large file, make a filesystem on that file, and mount the filesystem at /home
Pro
469 points
Hi Majid Ali Syed Amjad Ali Sayed,
May I demonstrate the simple process... Done on RHEL7 system using EXT4 file system type. It creates a sparse file, then file system, and then enables quotas.
# cd /opt
# truncate -s 512M newfs
# mke2fs -t ext4 -m 1 newfs
mke2fs 1.42.9 (28-Dec-2013)
newfs is not a block special device.
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
Discarding device blocks: done
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
32768 inodes, 131072 blocks
1310 blocks (1.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=134217728
4 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304
Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (4096 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done
# mkdir /newfs
# mount -o loop,usrjquota=aquota.user,grpjquota=aquota.grp,jqfmt=vfsv1 /opt/newfs /newfs
# df -h /newfs
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/loop0 488M 780K 472M 1% /newfs
# quotacheck -cug -F vfsv1 /newfs
Regards,
Dusan Baljevic (amateur radio VK2COT)
Pro
469 points
Hi again,
Yes, you can change the mount point to any other name. Just watch out that nobody is currently using /home as part of their login session. If they are, ask them to log off, move files in /home to some other location temporarily, then create a new file system, and move the files back.
Having new disks is always going to be the best option.
And yes, you can use NFS. Here is a simple example by using NFSv3 on the same machine:
# cat /etc/exports
/newfs *(ro,insecure,all_squash)
# mkdir /nfsclient
# mount -t nfs myhost.dom:/newfs /nfsclient
# df -h |grep newfs
/dev/loop0 488M 796K 472M 1% /newfs
myhost.dom:/newfs 488M 0 472M 0% /nfsclient
Disadvantages of loopback file system built from file, the quick summary I could think of:
a) Uses disk space from another already-assigned file system.
b) One needs to be mindful how to back it up and restore files if required.
c) Accidental removal of files. This worked without any warning:
# rm newfs
rm: remove regular file ‘newfs’? y
# ls /opt/newfs
ls: cannot access /opt/newfs: No such file or directory
#df -h |grep newfs
/dev/loop0 488M 796K 472M 1% /newfs
myhost.dom:/newfs 488M 0 472M 0% /nfsclient
I did not have time to check the consequences of this deletion.
Regards,
Dusan Baljevic
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