AIX: Howto setup a new /home directory on a new harddrive

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Our AIX 5.3 IntelliStation was running out of space in the /home directory and we needed to move the /home directory to a different location.

Fortunately, the IntelliStation we are using had a second harddrive "hdisk1" which was not used at all.

Please note: I am working as a software engineer, not as an admin. But since we don't have a dedicated AIX admin, I am feeling somehow responsible for this machine.

I am very confused with all this AIX specific stuff:

  • Volume Groups
  • Physical Volumes
  • Logical Volumes
  • Journaled Filesystems and Filesystem Logs

… and I need some help.

Best Answer

Meanwhile I found a solution for the topic mentioned. But I would like to let others know how I did that.

I found this great description from a guy whose name is "Ryan".

see: Ryan's AIX description

The only thing I had to change was: use jfs instead of jfs2 (for whatever reason).

Here is a summary of the commands I used to get this working:

1. mkvg -y homevg hdisk1                    # create a new volume group on the new/free  harddisk
2. mklv -t jfslog -y loghomevg homevg 1     # prepare log for the new filesystem
3. mklv -t jfs    -y    homelv homevg 64G   # prepare a 64G partition for the new /home
4. mkfs -o log=/dev/loghomevg  -V jfs /dev/homelv # create new jfs filesystem.
5. mkdir /home2                             # create a mountpoint for the new filesystem
6. chown bin:bin /home2                     # set ownership according to /home
7. mount -o log=/dev/loghomevg  /dev/homelv /home2 # mount the new filesystem

Note: in (4) you have to answer with "Yes". Afterwards it will take a while to complete.

After all that I copied the original content of the /home directory to /home2. I did so by using gnu tar, but other approaches should also work:

cd /home
gtar -cvpf - * | gtar -C /home2 -xpf -

you are done now!

finally you could unmount /home and use /home2 as the new /home directory, e.g. by modifying /etc/filesystems appropriately. Alternatively you could assign a new home directory to the users defined in /etc/passwd, e.g. use /home2/buildsys instead of /home/buildsys

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