HP Certified: HP-UX System Administration

Chapter Syllabus

18.1 Disk Devices and Their Configuration

18.2 Introduction to Logical Volume Manager

18.3 Listing and Creating Logical Volumes

18.4 Introduction to File Systems

18.5 The HighPerformance File System

18.6 The Journaled File System

18.7 Creating a New File System

18.8 Mounting and Unmounting a File System

18.9 Managing a File System

18.10 File System Repair

18.11 Important LVM Commands

Disk and file system management is one of the important system administration tasks . It includes adding and removing disks, configuring these disks, creating file systems within these configurations, managing file systems, and repairing any disk problems. A disk may contain one or more file system. HP-UX offers the whole-disk and the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) approaches for disk management. While both of these approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages, it is possible to use both on a system simultaneously .

Whenever you run short of disk space, you add one or more disk drives to the system. The process of making these new disks usable for the system involves a number of steps. In this chapter, you will start with an introduction to disk devices and configuration schemes. Before creating logical volumes, you need to create physical volumes and volume groups. Once you have created the logical volumes, you can move to the file system creation process. You will find an introduction to the High-Performance File System (HFS) and the Journaled File System (JFS) and how to create a new file system and mount it automatically at startup time. The /etc/fstab file is a file system table used for file system mounting at the system startup time with user -defined options. Occasionally you may need to extend or reduce the sizes of different file systems, and you will learn some commands to carry out such operations.

If you don't shut down your system properly or in the case of a system crash, the file system may go bad. In such a case, you have to repair it. The fsck command is used for this purpose, and you will learn how to use it.

After going through this chapter, you will be able to handle system administration tasks related to disks and logical volumes and to troubleshoot disk drives and file system problems.