[ale] Looking for recommendations on LVM + soft Raid on home server

[Neal Rhodes]

Thanks for the response.   I'll admit that I'm learning LVM as I go
here.   I _really_ liked the feature where LVM will mirror a
LV..........provided you have THREE physical volumes.    Yeah, that's
real handy for a two drive SATA server.    What happens when one of
those PV bites the dust? 


Now, I've already messed with logging in as root, unmounting /home
and /u, and resizing both. 

However, I had to unmount them in order for the native LVM to be willing
to do that. which makes perfect sense. 

How is it that you can resize / without booting to a rescue disk?    And
if you have to boot to a CD/Usb to resize root, well, is there any
advantage to having / on LVM, or would it be safer to have / a regular
non-lvm filesystem, so that the thing is more likely to survive a
variety of events? 

Neal 



On Tue, 2012-03-20 at 00:30 -0400, James Sumners wrote:

> Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I have found having /boot on a non-LVM
> partition and everything else managed by LVM to be quite useful. In
> fact, I had to resize a root partition on a server I was setting up
> just today (well, yesterday at this point) because I forgot to appease
> the great Oracle client with way too much swap space (I gave 512MB and
> it wanted twice RAM [60GB of swap?! Ridiculous]). It's also handy when
> you need to add a new drive into the mix for more free space. 
> 
> But I'm really just getting used to LVM myself.
> 
> On Monday, March 19, 2012, Neal Rhodes <neal at mnopltd.com> wrote:
> > I'm getting ready for the 3rd time installing Centos 6.2 on new
> server for home.   We usually figure we get to install at least twice
> on a new OS and hardware.
> >
> > This time the re-install is to get the drive partitioning and soft
> RAID right.    I didn't have the 2nd drive for the 2nd install.
> >
> > Normally our prior Fedora servers have been
> >
> > /dev/md1 on / type ext3 (rw)
> > /dev/md0 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
> > /dev/md2 on /u type ext3 (rw)
> >
> > This time around I was thinking on using LVM, I guess to just get
> more experience with LVM.   However, since you wouldn't want to risk
> resizing /boot or root filesystem,  I see no point in them being in
> LVM.   
> >
> > Primary drive is 1.5TB, of which 220GB is occupied by Windows7 boot,
> which I'd prefer to not disturb. 
> > 2nd drive is 1TB.
> >
> > So, I'm thinking of a layout like this:
> >
> > /dev/md0 on /boot type ext3 (rw)   (whatever boot takes)
> > /dev/md1 on / type ext3 (rw)          (about 50GB)
> > /dev/md2 on VolumeGroup00         (about 1TB)
> >           And logical volumes for /home and /u, which can be resized
> as needed between /home and /u
> > /dev/sda? on /u2                              (remaining 300GB, not
> Raid 1, just on the one bigger drive)
> >
> > Is that going to work?   Other thoughts?
> >
> > Neal Rhodes
> > MNOP Ltd
> 
> -- 
> James Sumners
> http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/
> 
> "All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
> pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
> is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
> drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."
> 
> Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
> CH:D 59
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