I am in charge of a mail server running openSuse 10.3 that uses Postfix, Courier and authenticates via an external LDAP server using virtual users and domains.
My main problem at the moment is that I am fast running out of free space on one of my partitions that holds the maildirs for 3 of our virtual domains.
The partition is comprised of two 160GB sata drives in RAID 1.
My question is if there is an easy to way to replace the 160GB drives with larger ones without affecting the server functionality.
My thought was to clone the disks using Acronis or something similar but I’m not sure what changes I would have to make to my fstab entries.
I’ve searched around on the net but can’t find anything useful, if you can point me in the right direction I’d be gratefull
P/S: Sorry if this is the wrong forum to post in, but it seemed the most relevant
No special software tools required other than what you already have on the server.
Obtain new disks.
Format them with filesystem (RAID1 also presumably)
Mount on some other mount point
Shutdown mail services
Copy files to new partition using cp -a
Umount old and new filesystems
Adjust fstab
Mount new filesystem on old mountpoint
Restart mail services
jimitris wrote:
> My main problem at the moment is that I am fast running out of free
> space on one of my partitions that holds the maildirs for 3 of our
> virtual domains.
no, your main problem is that openSUSE 10.3 has NOT been supported nor
had any security updates for almost a year…
i strongly urge you to not use that system exposed to the internet, in
any way whatsoever…
>
> Hello all,
>
> I am in charge of a mail server running openSuse 10.3 that uses
> Postfix, Courier and authenticates via an external LDAP server using
> virtual users and domains.
>
> My main problem at the moment is that I am fast running out of free
> space on one of my partitions that holds the maildirs for 3 of our
> virtual domains.
>
> The partition is comprised of two 160GB sata drives in RAID 1.
>
> My question is if there is an easy to way to replace the 160GB drives
> with larger ones without affecting the server functionality.
Here’s what I would do -
install two new drives, create the RAID1 array, create a filesystem on
it, mount it <somewhere>. stop postfix+courier. Use rsync to copy
everything from old array to new array. Unmount old array, mount new
array. Update fstab to mount <newarray> instead of <oldarray>. Start
postfix+courier. Optionally remove old drives.
>no, your main problem is that openSUSE 10.3 has NOT been supported nor
>had any security updates for almost a year…
>
>i strongly urge you to not use that system exposed to the internet, in
>any way whatsoever…
I couldn’t agree with you more, unfortunately its not entirely my decision and its not possible to upgrade the system at this point in the year.
As for the copy options (r-sync and cp -a) I was under the impression that IMAP mailboxes needed to be copied with specific utilities (such as imapcopy)
You can do a straight file copy if you’re not upgrading the mail appliction’s database application. Assuming the mail application resides on a different partition and isn’t touched, it only needs to be pointed to the files it needs.
On the other hand, if you upgraded the mail application and it uses a newer, upgraded version of database management, then unless the upgrade includes a fully scripted upgrade automating the process you will instead start with a new, empty mail store (storage). In that case, you would then need to do a mail data import/export according to the application’s instructions.
