[olug] The "other" raid utility usage

[Daniel G. Linder]

Matthew, or anyone else for that matter,

  Has anyone ever tried the filesystem resize "stuff"?  I know that EXT2 has some hooks to allow for a filesystem to be resized, but do I have to un-mount that filesystem to do this, or can I do it on the fly (if I have space on the HDD)?  Here is what lead to this question:

  Say I am fortunate enough to have a hot-swappable RAID array with five 18GB HDDs setup in RAID-5 using 100% of the HDD space.  Years go by, and as drives fail, I replace them but since prices have come down I purchase 36GB HDDs and just leave the remainder un-formatted.  Once all five HDD's have been replaced, I *could* then expand the filesystem and get double the space without rebuilding the partition...  If this were an extremely critical system -- i.e. 99.999% uptime is not good enough :) -- then doing the expansion on the fly would be really cool and a big shot in the arm for Linux. :D

Dan
(Just trying to scrape together enough $$$ for a *single* larger HDD... :( )