Management of Filesystems / EXT3 ?
 

Hi,

I have been surfing around looking for info. on how to manipulate ext3 filesystems, and so far found everything about the advantages, capabilities etc. of ext3 but nothing about the tools and how to manipulate ext3 filesystems.

Anyway, my question is :
Is there a tool like AIX's smitty lvm (extendvg, reducevg) which allows you to expand/extend/reduce an ext3 filesystem ? Why you ask, well, my /var directory which holds my spool/mail directory is full and I need to extend it for more space to hold mails. Any help ?

Also,
1. Is there a command which allows to view disk space on the harddisk which has not been allocated ?

2. Is there a command to show the paging space (ie AIX:lsps) in linux ?

3. Is there a tool that allows for the backup and restore of the root filesystem ie AIX's mksysb or something similar in Linux ?

4. Is there any website that I can go to, to get more info on linux filesystem management capabilities and tools ?

Sorry for the long questions, I have been using AIX and Linux for some time and am not familiar with ext3 at the moment.

Thanks in advance.
Saran.

1.parted can be used to resize ext3 partitions http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/
2.for equivalents of AIX commands on linux take a look here http://www.unixguide.net/unixguide.shtml
as for lsps the equivalent might be free
3.tar is everything I might think of that is included in every linux distribution
4.Cruising around http://www.google.com/linux might be of help, there are a lot of articles available at http://www.lwn.net , http://linuxmagazine.com , http://linuxdevices.com , etc

Here are a couple of backup suggestions:

kbackup with kbackup-doc and kbackup-multibuf

afbackup with afbackup-client

-mk

Thanks guys,

I found some info on LVM for Linux. Haven't tried it out yet, and am not sure if it is going to screw up my system when I install it.

Anybody knows if there is any other way to get LVM installed on RH7.3 ?

Regards.

I use the lvm for Linux and I like it. Like you, I use the lvm with AIX and I liked the flexibility for growing filesystems as needed. I currently have two Linux machines running the lvm, one of them with root partition included. Slackware 8.1 comes with the lvm stuff, but I built it (kernel and apps) myself with previous versions.

The only drawback that I have run into, is getting a partially damage system restored is not as easy as with regular partitioning. I had a hardware problem that junked my /usr partition, and booting from floppy with lvm support was not easy. Got it all running though.

I still like it and continue to use it. Sistina has good documentation and great howtos.