Rebuilding a newly bought server

[fg_1]

I just placed an order where the size of the OS partitions are all wrong and need to be redone. Is there a way for me to rebuild these easily? These systems are A-500's and I am looking for the easiest way to do it without having to kill everything else that was loaded on the box for me. The one partition that scares me in size is /stand which is 84MB in size and I believe I remember that you cannot just extend that on the fly. Any help would be great.

Thank you.

[Vikas Khator]

Hi ,

As far as stand goes don't worry about it . It should not grow beyond 84M.

On most of my servers it's between 47 - 55 % utlised.

[Jitendra_1]

84MB for /stand is not that bad. However if you still want to extend that partition , you can install Ignite/UX on this box and create a recovery tape using make_recovery -A . Then rebuild your server using this tape and when it is booting , interrupt the boot sequence and then increase the partitions as you like.
The other option is reinstalling the server from scratch.

[Patrick Wallek]

If you have a tape drive you can attach to those, then your best bet would be to install Ignite-UX, do a make_recovery and then re-load from the make_recovery tape. All the software that came pre-installed will be available after the make_recovery. I recently did this on an N4000 and it worked like a charm.

[fg_1]

One additional thing, I don't have tape drives on these servers, but I do have a spare disk in each of them? what should I do with this.

[Tim Medford · Accepted solution]

Frank - Another thing you could do is take the spare drive on the machine and make an alternate boot drive out of it. When you make the logical volumes on the second drive, size them however you please. You will end up cpio'ing all your root file systems over there and will not lose any configuration.

Then simply set that second drive as your primary boot device. Or, boot from it once, mediainit the original boot disk, and then repeat the process.

There was a post on this forum several weeks ago about how to create an alternate boot drive (I think Penny Fong sent it). It works really slick, I did it and now have dual boot drives on all of our servers.

Regards, Tim

p.s. I still have the instructions on paper if you cannot find them, let me know and I'll fax them to you. (timmed@saif.com)

[Peggy Fong]

Frank
We resized our lvols by using a separate disk. As Tim mentioned I did post how to create this second bootable device which I have used extensively (it's also a great backout when you have major patches or when going to new releases).
Here's the link to the thread that contains the detailed instructions:

[Peggy Fong]

oops - hit a wrong key and submitted to soon. Here's the link:
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0xa1c6d06ed8c8d4118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

[Marc Dijkstra]

Instead of rebuilding etc. why don't you just boot the servers into single user mode and extend the size of the lvols?
Before you reboot, get the current size of the lvols.
#vgdisplay -v /dev/vgxx |more
from this get the number of free PE's (multiply by the PE size, generally 4MB)
#lvextend -L (newsize, total MB!) /dev/vgxx/lvolx
#extendfs /dev/vgxx/lvolx

Please remember that the lvextend -L is the TOTAL size of the lvol after you have added space.

man lvextend
man extendfs

MND

[Peggy Fong]

Marc
Have you resized root, swap, stand that way? I've worked for on HP a long time and have never done that and there are issues like contiguous file systems and certain requirements the system has to know e.g. where stand starts and how big it is. If you've done it and it works - great - a simpler solution. Seemed like there were too many gotchas to risk having an unbootable system.
(I've always had a penchant for an alternate boot disk which I am sure you will see in past and future postings).

[Marc Dijkstra]

Hi Peggy. I am in complete agreement, and should have added an addendum!!! The root filesystem (/) CANNOT be increased, as it is mounted, the swap should not, as you say, be increased due to contiguous block allocation, and, as stated above, stand is a-ok size-wise. I took into account the default build of HP-UX and the sizes of /var, /opt, /usr etc. which are generally far too small.

I never touch / in any event, as NO software should be put there, so as Peggy said, do not touch any of the 3 mentioned. If swap is too small, consider adding another lvol of swap.

Thanks Peggy
MND