[Dovecot] 76Gb to 146Gb

[Ed W]

This is one of those questions which is almost too easy if you are 
familiar with Linux.  Trying not to sound like a d*ck, but is it an 
option to rent someone to help with admin jobs?  For example, were it me 
then I would probably have setup some partitioning scheme with separate 
partitions for data and operating system?  Possibly also using LVM?

You have several options, mainly the choice of filesystem will dictate 
here, but quite possibly you can:
1) Pull the drives one by one and rebuild the raid after each. Keep the 
old drives since you can technically roll back onto them. Expand the 
partitions (scary without LVM) and then expand the filesystem on the 
partitions
2) Boot from a DVD/Flash on your favourite rescue distro (I like 
sysrecuecd). Create the new raid, copy the old to the new, remove the 
old drives, reboot from new.  Possibly taking the time to repartition 
and move some data around while you do it (remember to update fstab)

Both are fairly simple if you have done it once, but it would be well 
worth finding someone either local or who will log in via remote control 
and support you?

Final thought:  For the size of drives you are looking at, SSD drives 
are relatively inexpensive and likely comparable with the high end 
drives you are probably looking to buy?  For 40 users I would hazard a 
guess you likely would be happy with inexpensive low end drives, but 
certainly a couple of small SSDs will blow away a spinning disk and give 
you a decent upgrade...

Good luck

Ed W



On 24/09/2012 18:42, Spyros Tsiolis wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I have a DL360 G4 1U server that does a wonderfull job with dovecot horde,
> Xmail and OpenLDAP for a company and serving about 40 acouunts.
>
> The machine is wonderful. I am very happy with it.
> However, I am running out of disk space.
> It has two times 76Gb Drives in RAID1 (disk mirroring) and the capacity
> has reached 82%.
>
> I am starting of getting nervous.
>
> Does anyone know of a painless way to migrate the entire contents directly
> to another pair of 146Gb SCSI RAID1 disks ?
>
> I thought of downtime and using clonezilla, but my last experience with it
> was questionable. I remember having problems declaring disk re-sizing
> from the smaller capacity drives to the larger ones.
>
> CentOS 5.5
> Manual install of :
>
> Mysql
> XMail (pop3/smtp)
> ASSP (anti spam)
> Apache / LAMP
> and last but by no means list : Dovecot
>
> Dovecot -n :
>
> # 1.2.16: /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
> # OS: Linux 2.6.18-194.17.4.el5 i686 CentOS release 5.5 (Final) ext3
> base_dir: /var/run/dovecot/
> log_path: /var/log/dovecot/dovecot.log
> info_log_path: /var/log/dovecot/dovecot-info.log
> ssl_parameters_regenerate: 48
> verbose_ssl: yes
> login_dir: /var/run/dovecot//login
> login_executable: /usr/local/dovecot/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
> login_greeting: * Dovecot ready *
> login_max_processes_count: 96
> mail_location: maildir:/var/MailRoot/domains/%d/%n/Maildir
> mail_plugins: zlib
> auth default:
>    verbose: yes
>    debug: yes
>    debug_passwords: yes
>    passdb:
>      driver: passwd-file
>      args: /etc/dovecot/passwd
>    passdb:
>      driver: pam
>    userdb:
>      driver: static
>      args: uid=vmail gid=vmail home=/home/vmail/%u
>    userdb:
>      driver: passwd
>
>
> Any help would be appreciated or any ideas you might have.
>
> Regards,
>
> spyros
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----
> "I merely function as a channel that filters
> music through the chaos of noise"
> - Vangelis