Bdtyktl

I've got an old server that will be re-purposed. Part of this means rearranging the partitions. The current layout is:

$ lsblk

NAME                    MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT

sda                       8:0    0 558.7G  0 disk 

├─sda1                    8:1    0 243.5M  0 part /boot

├─sda2                    8:2    0     1K  0 part 

└─sda5                    8:5    0 558.5G  0 part 

  ├─root                254:0    0   9.3G  0 lvm  /

  ├─swap_1              254:1    0  21.8G  0 lvm  [SWAP]

  └─home                254:2    0 527.4G  0 lvm  /opt

sr0                      11:0    1  1024M  0 rom  

The root partition is very small, and I need to merge it with home to make one single partition. Is it possible to merge these without losing data? I'm concerned that if data is lost in either partition, I might not be able to log in again - I only have ssh access. The machine is in a data centre that I can't get physical access to should something go wrong. I can't just pop in a Live CD and repartition from there.

I know there are many GUI tools that can manage partitions, I need a CLI solution.

Presuming you actually have free space on /opt, and it's a filesystem that supports at least offline shrinking, the safest bet would be:

1. Since your home directory is on /opt, you can't be logged in to it — or you won't be able to unmount /opt. One way around this is to enable root login via ssh, using public keys. I don't have an Ubuntu box in front of me to be 100% sure of the steps, but it should just be editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config to change PermitRootLogin to prohibit-password (or without-password, for older versions of OpenSSH). Then put your public key in /root/.ssh/authorized_keys. An alternative (suggested by @bistoco) is to create a new user, with a home directory on the root filesystem, e.g.,: sudo mkdir /tmphome && sudo adduser --home /tmphome tmpuser && sudo adduser tmpuser sudo
   


2. Make sure you can log in as root or the new user now. Do this from another terminal, do not log out your other session until you've logged in as root, either directly or via sudo from the new user (essential for recovery if, e.g., you accidentally broke sshd)


3. Log in a second root session, just in case. You use this if you somehow break your first one.


4. Finally log out your user session, and any others you have.


5. Unmount /opt. If umount /opt gives an in use error, use fuser -vm /opt (or whatever) to see what is accessing it. You might also need to stop some services, or find another session to log out. (If you can't get /opt to unmount, go to step 10 to abort the process).


6. Shrinking a volume often requires an fsck, and its a good idea anyway. You'll probably need to add -f to force fsck on a clean device. E.g., fsck -f /dev/mapper/VGNAME-home. This may take a while. (If fsck fails, stop. Check for typos. If it's really failing, something is wrong.)


7. Reduce the volume: lvreduce -Ay -r -L 100G VGNAME/home. The -r tells it to reduce the filesystem first. The 100G is the new size; pick whatever you'd like (of course can't be smaller than the amount of data on /opt). This make take a long while, depending on how much data is on the volume. If this fails due to not supported, this isn't going to work. Proceed to 9 to abort. (If it fails complaining you asked it to shrink to much, pick a larger size and repeat the command).


8. Enlarge the rootfs: lvextend -Ay -r -L 200G VGNAME/root. Again the 200G is the size, and can be whatever you need (up to all available space). The -r tells it to resize the filesystem as well (after enlarging the LV); typically this can be done on-line. If it can't... well, your system will still be accessible, but really you need to find a way to use a live CD.


9. Regardless of if that worked, mount /opt.


10. Make sure you can log in as your user again. Do not log out your root sessions until you've confirmed you can. If you're using SSH connection multiplexing, use ssh -o ControlPath=none user@host to make sure a cached connection is not fooling you.


11. Start any services that you had to stop to unmount /opt. At least if you want them running.


12. Change the ssh setting back to not allowing root login, if that's the option you pick and is the way it was before. Make sure you can log in a new session before logging out. Always do this when changing sshd config. Or, if you created a new user, remove it with e.g., deluser --remove-home tmpuser
    

PS: You do not need to grow / to occupy all the available space. You can always extend it again if you need to — it's often better to leave some space in a PV unallocated.