How to mount a volume with a different mount point in Aix ? – Technology, Computer, Network and Games Cheat

I ran across a situation where my volume was running low on free disk space. In order to prevent my application from crashing, I had to either expand the volume or move the application files to a larger volume. Well, in this case the volume was created with Veritas and I wanted to move the files off to a Aix natively created volume. There were some pretty good business reasons for not expanding the Veeritas volume, one of them being the lack of good support.

Well here is how I did it. First create a new volume and file system, in this case the new volume was mounted as /new-vol. I then backed up all files in the old Veritas volume to tape, let’s say the volume is /old-vol. To back this up to tape (/dev/rmt0) I issued the command ‘tar – cvf /dev/rmt0 /old-vol’, notice I used absolute path and not relative path. You can use either absolute or relative path, for relative simply put a period in front, e.g. ‘tar -cvf /dev/rmt0 ./old-vol’. The period means current directory, so make sure you have changed directory to the proper path, before issuing the tar command.

To rename the mount point, first unmount the volumes. e.g. umount /old-vol and unmount /new-vol. If you get the error that the resource is busy and the volume cannot be unmounted. Then you will need to stop the process that is running. To find out what process was using the /old-vol, first find out what volume is associated with /old-vol. You can do this by issuing the command ‘mount’, and look for the volume name next to the mount point. Then issue the command fuser -c ‘volume name’, this will display any running process. Alternatively the command ‘listuser’, which will display all users currently logged in. The command ‘kill -9 process#’ will stop the running process.

Now edit the file /etc/filesystems and find the line ‘old-vol ‘, and replace that with ‘old-vol-bak’. Also change ‘new-vol’ to ‘old-vol’. Go to the / directory and delete the directory new-vol, ‘rm -r new-vol’, this will remove the directory and all files inside it. Create a directory old-vol-bak, ‘mkdir old-vol-bak’. You should be able to mount the volumes now with these commands, ‘mount /old-vol’ and ‘mount /old-vol-bak’.

Now restore the files from tape with the tar command.

Â tar -xvf /dev/rmt0 /old-vol

This will restore all files under /old-vol.

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