Linux Rescue Mode - Dumb/Paranoid Question. . . (Redhat/CentOS)

[Hurin]

Hi all,

Well, I overlooked something and now I've got a production server in place that's got its hard drive space allocated wrong. By default CentOS/Redhat 7 allocates the vast majority of drive space to the /home partition rather than the / (root) partition.

I need to switch those around. I'm okay with doing that. But to do so, I'm going to need to boot into rescue mode.

Because this server is otherwise pristine, and I hate to muck about on a pristine server, I'm going to paranoidly ask:

Is there anything about booting into rescue mode itself that would alter the permissions (including SELinux) or file structure of the server permanently?​

That may seem like an odd question. I've had to boot into rescue mode on secondary servers before. And never gave it a second thought (and no harm was done. . . I didn't get a call that my server was compromised two weeks later and told: "You mean you used rescue mode but didn't execute "superduperresecurefilesystem.sh" on it afterwards!?!"). But this one's my new baby and I'm being protective of it. =)

Thanks!

--H

 

[Frobozz]

If it is setup with LVM, you shouldn't have a problem shrinking /home and expanding /. Physical volumes could get more involved as you have to worry about what partition is located next to what, etc... You may have an easier experience by booting a some live media like GParted to work through it without the root partition you're working on being mounted. In regards to your files/SELinux contexts, nothing should change with a resizing exercise. A lot of the quirks are in the details of your partition scheme. If you have a VM to test on first, that might be the way to learn.

 

[Hurin]

Cool, thanks. Was going to goof around on a VM first. And then, the server itself is a VM so I'll snapshot it prior to the work in case something goes terrible.