Anyone actually done this? I tried once on Veritas V2.5.xx, something like that, and, although the docs indicate shrinkage is possible the s/w didn't allow the operation. I had to offload the data, remove the volume & start over. Now, this was Veritas on a Solaris machine. Bob Francett BP Exploration (Alaska)

-----Original Message----- From: Aaron Sherman [mailto:ajs@ajs.com] Sent: Monday, August 21, 2000 12:48 PM To: Eyal Traitel Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: Removing disks from a volume

On Mon, Aug 21, 2000 at 12:38:40PM -0700, Eyal Traitel wrote:

It would be lovely if there was such a RAID-filesystem... If anyone have heard of such - share with us...

As noted by another, Veritas is capable of this. I've included an excerpt from the docs, below:

[begin vxassist man-page] NAME vxassist - create, mirror, backup, grow, shrink, and move volumes [...] shrinkto and shrinkby Decrease the length of the named volume to the length specified by newlength (shrinkto), or by the length specified by lengthchange (shrinkby). The new length or change in length is specified as a standard Volume Manager length [see vxintro(1M)]. The shrinkto opera- tion fails if the new length is not less than the current volume length. [...end]

Of course, this only shrinks the whole volume, but it is my understanding that at that point, you can re-arange the plexes so that the disk you want to remove no longer has any plexes on it. It's ugly and complex, but possible. It strikes me as very strange that a system that's otherwise so flexible does not allow this. We've really hosed ourselves because on one Filer (while attempting to set up a volume that we could volcopy to), we accidentally added disks to the root volume. So, now we have to do what? Re-install?