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Disk resize

Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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  • W
    Wolfgangthegreat
    last edited by Oct 20, 2023, 3:39 PM

    Hello,

    I use pfSense 2.7.0, on a VM in the cloud, with one virtual disk.

    The installation process needed a "side" install storage, which I took from the one virtual disk I have, so I split the disk to two disks.

    Now that the installation is over successfully, I deleted the install disk and I am left with pfSense disk that is not using all of the disk storage that I got from the cloud provider.

    So, my question is if there is any special process how to resize the pfSense disk? or should I find any guide on the Internet how to resize a freebsd disk and follow it?

    Thanks.

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • S
      stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
      last edited by Oct 20, 2023, 4:56 PM

      If you run at the command line: touch /root/force_growfs and then reboot it should fill the drive.

      However I strongly recommend snapshotting the VM first if you can. I've used that command many times without issue but it's usually only ever run at first boot after installing.

      Steve

      W 1 Reply Last reply Oct 20, 2023, 6:58 PM Reply Quote 1
      • W
        Wolfgangthegreat @stephenw10
        last edited by Oct 20, 2023, 6:58 PM

        @stephenw10 Thank you.

        Your idea did the trick!
        But possibly only for part of the way...

        The total disk size I get from the cloud provider is 25 GB.
        Internally it was 16 GB and after the above procedure - it is now 21 GB.
        Is it possible that pfSense save the missing 4 GB for some internal use of its own?

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • S
          stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
          last edited by Oct 20, 2023, 7:35 PM

          It may be that's the formatted size. It might be using some of the rest of that for SWAP.

          Try running: geom part list

          W 2 Replies Last reply Oct 20, 2023, 7:43 PM Reply Quote 0
          • W
            Wolfgangthegreat @stephenw10
            last edited by Oct 20, 2023, 7:43 PM

            @stephenw10

            OK, these are the main attributes of the reply for the command you offered:
            "
            providers:

            Mediasize: 524288 (512K)
            type: freebsd-boot

            Mediasize: 1073741824 (1.0G)
            type: freebsd-swap

            Mediasize: 25768734720 (24G)
            type: freebsd-zfs

            Consumers:
            Mediasize: 26843545600 (25G)
            "

            Then I ran df -h and got this:
            "
            Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
            pfSense/ROOT/default 21G 626M 20G 3% /
            devfs 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev
            pfSense/tmp 20G 176K 20G 0% /tmp
            pfSense/var 20G 3.3M 20G 0% /var
            pfSense 20G 96K 20G 0% /pfSense
            pfSense/home 20G 96K 20G 0% /home
            pfSense/var/db 20G 1.1M 20G 0% /var/db
            pfSense/var/log 20G 1.3M 20G 0% /var/log
            pfSense/var/empty 20G 96K 20G 0% /var/empty
            pfSense/var/cache 20G 12M 20G 0% /var/cache
            pfSense/reservation 22G 96K 22G 0% /pfSense/reservation
            pfSense/var/tmp 20G 104K 20G 0% /var/tmp
            pfSense/ROOT/default/cf 20G 516K 20G 0% /cf
            pfSense/ROOT/default/var_db_pkg 20G 2.9M 20G 0% /var/db/pkg
            tmpfs 4.0M 108K 3.9M 3% /var/run
            devfs 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /var/dhcpd/dev
            "

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • W
              Wolfgangthegreat @stephenw10
              last edited by Oct 20, 2023, 7:54 PM

              @stephenw10

              Also ran
              egrep 'da[0-9]|cd[0-9]' /var/run/dmesg.boot

              which gave:
              "
              acpi_syscontainer1: <System Container> port 0xcd8-0xce3 on acpi0
              acpi_syscontainer3: <System Container> port 0xcc0-0xcd7 on acpi0
              da0 at vtscsi0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0
              da0: <QEMU QEMU HARDDISK 2.5+> Fixed Direct Access SPC-3 SCSI device
              da0: 300.000MB/s transfers
              da0: Command Queueing enabled
              da0: 25600MB (52428800 512 byte sectors)
              GEOM: da0: the secondary GPT header is not in the last LBA.
              "

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • S
                stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                last edited by Oct 20, 2023, 8:12 PM

                That doesn't look unreasonable. Have you taken any ZFS snapshots? Those will use space and not appear there.

                W 1 Reply Last reply Oct 21, 2023, 10:08 AM Reply Quote 0
                • W
                  Wolfgangthegreat @stephenw10
                  last edited by Oct 21, 2023, 10:08 AM

                  Hi @stephenw10 ,

                  I checked that, no snapshots were made.

                  4 out of 25 is 16%, 16% overhead doesn't sound to me reasonable for disk management/operations.
                  But I am not a storage expert, I am writing from what I know as non-expert.

                  I also searched an found lower percentage numbers, like 4%, at https://wintelguy.com/2017/zfs-storage-overhead.html

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • S
                    stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                    last edited by Oct 21, 2023, 2:17 PM

                    Potentially the partition layout could have prevented growfs using that space. Note the pfSense/reservation mount point shows 22G.
                    Do you actually need any more space?

                    W 1 Reply Last reply Oct 21, 2023, 2:27 PM Reply Quote 0
                    • W
                      Wolfgangthegreat @stephenw10
                      last edited by Oct 21, 2023, 2:27 PM

                      @stephenw10
                      I will be able to live with the missing space, I only like things to be tidy and efficient and it looks like a kind of storage glitch and waste here. I hope someone at Netgate will have a look into this.

                      Anyway, thank you for discussing this with me, I will not waste your time anymore on this.

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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