[ale] Online resize of EXT3 on plain partition

[brian at polibyte.com]

This is just an academic question, but does anyone know if online growth
of an ext3 filesystem that resides on a plain partition (i.e. not lvm or
softwre raid) is possible?

The problem I ran into (on RHEL5) is that after I expanded the partition
to use the new space, the kernel didn't seem to re-read the partition
table. resize2fs reported that the filesystem was already using all the
available blocks. Running partprobe on the sevice did not make a
difference. After rebooting, I was able to grow the filesystem.

All the best,
Brian Pitts