[Solved] “Filesystem is already n blocks long. Nothing to do!”

tl;dr: if you’re sure you did everything right, use lsblk or parted (etc) to see if a partition table is present on your logical volume.

So I am in the process of merging the content of two fileservers, and had the need to extend a logical volume to accommodate some additional data. No problem- that’s one of the benefits of using LVM!

Except after resizing, I ran into a problem:

$ lvextend +150G /dev/vg/lvinquestion
$ resize2fs /dev/vg/lvinquestion
> The filesystem is already 268435200 (4k) blocks long. Nothing to do!

Wait, what? Aside from the fact I could have combined the comments by including the --resizefs option to lvextend, why was resize2fs complaining that there was “Nothing to do!”?

Fortunately SE Arquade user ToxicFrog had the answer:

@bertieb parted reports the partition size, not the filesystem size
If it’s a partitioned LV you need to resize the partition after expanding the VL
*LV

Ah, whoops! I’m not sure why I partitioned the LV (it only had one partition) but I must have done so.

lsblk confirmed the partition:

sdh                                8:112  0   2.7T  0 disk
??sdh1                             8:113  0   2.7T  0 part
  ??md1                            9:1    0  10.9T  0 raid6
  (...)
    ??vg-lv                      253:9    0   1.2T  0 lvm
    ? ??vg-lv1                   253:18   0   1.1T  0 part

So, then what? Well, I used dd to copy the filesystem to a new logical volume, then extended that, and finally removed the original:

# dd if=/dev/dm-18 bs=1M | pv -s 1T |  dd of=/dev/vg/lv-new bs=1M
# lvextend --resizefs -L 1.15T /dev/vg/lv-new
# lvremove /dev/vg/lv
# lvrename vg lv-new lv

(pv was included to give a nice progress indicator, rather than faffing around with SIGUSR1)

And that was that. There was a slight problem with removing the original logical volume, but more on that later…