This post is a collection of data related to fixing an issue with the distribution of space coming from a Dell

Services that need to be stopped:

• postfix.service – Postfix is delivering the mail to home/vmail
• dovecot.service – Dovecot looks to the home/vmail

Commands that will be run:

XFSDUMP – backs up the /home filesystem to external USB drive:
xfsdump -l 0 -f /mnt/linuxBackup/home.xfsdump /home

xfsrestore -f /mnt/linuxBackup/home.xfsdump /home

Important links

• YallaLabs – Proof of concept and steps.

So when I reformatted the server to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it was basically a fresh start as I got rid of the SAS drives in favor of SATA, there’s a rant someplace on my tech blog about it. Long story short I accepted all the defaults and got on with the business of getting everything that had been set up on Fedora ported over to RHEL. One thing I noticed was mount point / had 75GB while /home had 12TB. Odd but surely there would be a way to shrink home and add it to the root, I’ll contend with it later.

So now it’s later because I have round about 6GB left on the root and now we find XFS filesystems don’t have shrink capabilities… Nice!!! It appears that it wasn’t thought of because hey, storage is cheap, buy and attach new drives and expand the LVM2 VG.