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

[Neal Rhodes]

Thanks to all for the responses.   I had done soft Raid,   I had done
LVM a little, but never LVM on top of softRaid. 

I screwed up my courage to the sticking point last night,  exported the
Virtualbox appliances, and reinstalled 6.2. 

Of course, the first CD boot, to install, rattled for a while, then
after a couple minutes it completely hung with the Centos logo on the
screen.  Great.
The 2nd time booting, using the text install, I didn't have the disk
setup options.  Super. 
The third time I booted to the live CD, then picked "install to hard
disk", and got the disk setup I've grown to know and.... be ok with. 

I averaged out the responses, put /boot on /dev/md0, and the only PV
on /dev/md1, and split out root, home and u under that.  All appears to
be well. 

To answer your question, /u for me is typically my products,
databases... all my company's stuff, which isn't mine personally.    I
attempt to segregate that from linux stuff in the standard directories.
I attempt to avoid anything in /usr which isn't a part of Linux.
Excepting /usr/local.      So my priority in making backups is always /u
first, then /home, then /usr/local, then / minus those three.    

It's my hope that if I were to blow away the linux boot or / data, by
having a separate filesystem I'm more likely to be able to pop the drive
into a newly built replacement chassis and mount /home and /u.  The junk
in /usr/local is stuff I COULD reload if I had to.   The stuff in /home
and /u exists nowhere else on the planet but my backups. 

Neal 

On Tue, 2012-03-20 at 05:21 -0400, Leam Hall wrote: 

> On 03/19/2012 10:35 PM, Neal Rhodes 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
> 
> Morning Neil!
> 
> If you're looking to learn, then life becomes a lot more fun! Some 
> things to consider might be adding a swap space partition and separating 
> /var, /usr, and /home from root (which you have done partly). Swap is a 
> separate partition at the BIOS level though you can add swap volumes 
> later under LVM. However, I prefer a swap partition because if the 
> machine needs to swap then adding overhead for LVM seems against the grain.
> 
> With /home separate you can just tar it up for archive, move it off the 
> machine, and then restore it back once you rebuild. I've been doing this 
> for years and still have files from 10 years ago even though a few of my 
> machines have crashed.
> 
> Moving /var and /usr off root helps because they tend to grow a lot. 
> That lets you move things around easier though it's a bit trickier than 
> /home.
> 
> What are you using /u for?
> 
> Leam
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