Guy Waugh wrote:
On a RHEL4 host, I have a mountpoint, /thing, with a SAN volume mounted
at this mountpoint.
The local volume that contains the mountpoint (i.e. the volume that is
mounted at /) is nearly full, and I'm suspecting it is because there are
files on the local volume in the /thing directory. Of course, I can't
get to the /thing directory by normal means (at least AFAIK), because
there is currently a volume mounted at that mountpoint.
Does anyone know if it possible to access (i.e. see and delete) the
files in the /thing directory without having to umount the SAN volume
that is mounted at /thing?
If some existing process has its CWD underneath /thing, then you can
access that directory via /proc/<pid>/cwd.
You could use debugfs on the root fs, but I wouldn't recommend trying
to modify a filesystem while it's mounted r/w.
If you can't unmount the SAN because it's busy, you may still be able
to move its mount point with "mount --move". If you can allow for it
being unavailable briefly you could move it off just long enough to
rename the underlying directory, e.g.:
mkdir /thing.tmp
mount --move /thing /thing.tmp
mv /thing /thing.orig
mkdir /thing
mount --move /thing.tmp /thing
rmdir /thing.tmp
