[NTLUG:Discuss] Growing filesystems

[Chris Cox]

Ralph Green, Jr. wrote:
> Chris,
>   How did the growing of those filesystems go on Saturday?  I expect
> other people you told about this would be interested in the outcome.

Instant death!

They have a HP DL580  with a SmartArray 5i controller.  It can
handle 4 hotswap drives... they had an existing raid5 using
3 drives.  They purchased another drive from HP and working
with an HP CONSULTANT they managed to add the new drive into
the array... with ONE issue left unoticed, even though the
RAID5 somehow depends on the new drive, it did NOT add additional
space to the logical drive array... it still shows the same
as when they just had 3 drives...   I really don't know how
they accomplished this feat.  They basically have a 3 drive
RAID5 that uses 4 drives INTIMATELY (not like a spare or
something).  So there's no way to remove the drive from
the RAID5 (it will simply go into degraded mode).

Anyway, the only solution now is to destroy the logical
array and reconfigure.  So growing a filesystem has turned
into a rebuild (sigh).