increase the number of inodes online

Question

Dears, I have a Redhat linux server Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.5 (Tikanga). It's a production sensitive server. now it ran out of inodes in /storage2 directory. It has many space but it almost finished inodes and I need to increase the number of inodes ASAP. with this link It has the solution but it needed to have backup and after changing the number of inodes in file system restore them. I wonder if there is any online solution so I could increase the inodes without taking backup and restore.

$ df -h 
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02
                       20G  6.5G   12G  35% /
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol04
                       58G  4.4G   51G   8% /home
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01
                      9.7G  211M  9.0G   3% /tmp
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03
                       20G   16G  2.6G  87% /var
/dev/mapper/vg_fvnx_stg2-lv_fvnx_stg2
                      3.0T  2.2T  690G  76% /storage2



$ df -ih 
Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02
                        5.0M    270K    4.8M    6% /
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol04
                         15M     310     15M    1% /home
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01
                        2.5M      71    2.5M    1% /tmp
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol03
                        5.0M    7.9K    5.0M    1% /var
/dev/mapper/vg_fvnx_stg2-lv_fvnx_stg2
                        192M    191M    1.3M  100% /storage2

Answer 1

Answer : no, you can't increase the inodes without taking the backup/restore.

man page for mkfs.ext4 (which I assume is the filesystem type in play here) is pretty clear on this:

It is not possible to change this value after the filesystem is created."

You could look into such solutions as creating a /storage2/subdirectoryname filesystem, and effectively place a few thousand files into that new filesystem, thus releasing a pile of inodes from /storage2.