[CentOS] Resizing est4 filesystem while mounted

Mon Jun 18 20:22:43 UTC 2012
Ray Van Dolson <rayvd at bludgeon.org>

On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 01:09:01PM -0700, Jeff Boyce wrote:
> >On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 12:10:09PM -0700, Jeff Boyce wrote:
> >>Greetings -
> >>
> >>I had a logical volume that was running out of space on a
> >>virtual machine.
> >>I successfully expanded the LV using lvextend, and lvdisplay
> >>shows that it
> >>has been expanded. Then I went to expand the filesystem to fill the new
> >>space (# resize2fs -p /dev/vde1) and I get the results that the
> >>filesystem
> >>is already xx blocks long, nothing to do. If I do a # df -h, I
> >>can see that
> >>the filesystem has not been extended. I could kick the users off the VM,
> >>reboot the VM using a GParted live CD and extend the filesystem that way,
> >>but I thought that it was possible to do this live and mounted?
> >>The RH docs
> >>say this is possible; the man page for resize2fs also says it is possible
> >>with ext4. What am I missing here? This is a Centos 6.2 VM with an ext4
> >>filesystem. The logical volumes are setup on the host system
> >>which is also
> >>a Centos 6.2 system.
> >
> >Try resize4fs (assuming your FS is ext4).
> >
> >Ray
> 
> Well, I have never seen a reference to resize4fs before (and yes my
> FS is ext4).  It is not on my Centos 6.2 system, and doing a little
> searching through repositories for that specifically, or e4fsprogs,
> and I can't find it anywhere to even try it.  Any google reference
> seems to point back to resize2fs.  I ended up booting a live
> SystemRescueCD and using GParted via the GUI.  My notes indicate
> that is what I had done previously also.  I am still stumped,
> everything that I have read indicates that resize2fs can do a live
> resizing on ext4 file systems.  Can anybody confirm or deny this?
> Is the reason I can't do this because it is on an LVM logical
> volume?  Thanks.
> 
> Jeff Boyce
> Meridian Environmental
> 

Interesting.  Maybe this is a difference between a 6.x and 5.x system.
On my RHEL 5.8 system:

# rpm -qf /sbin/resize4fs
e4fsprogs-1.41.12-2.el5

I see now from my Satellite server that this package dose not exist for
6.x.

It's not clear to me why you ran into the issue you did.  Will keep an
eye out for this here.

Ray