[ale] to lvm or not lvm is my dillema

[Chuck Payne]

Solomon,

Just a heads up, we use LUK at work. To expand the drive is hard. So make
sure you have the size you want. Take a look at expanding a LUK drive, so
you know. It not a simple explanation.

On Fri, Jan 2, 2026 at 11:03 AM DJPfulio--- via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> Yesterday, I ran out of storage in an LV used for containers.  A few
> refused to start after I shut them down to start troubleshooting. Nothing
> in the logs for any of the containers at startup.  Finally, I got some
> debug information and saw "Out of space" error.
>
> 5 seconds later and I'd added 10G more to the LV and all the containers
> started with no issues.
> # lvextend -L+10G /path/to/lv-device
>
> That's easy, provided the VG has unused storage.  Never allocate all the
> storage in a VG completely. For example
> $ sudo vgs
>    VG       #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize    VFree
>    vg01       1   9   0 wz--n- <930.78g <644.68g
>
> The running containers using the same LV storage kept working the entire
> time. I'll reboot the system sometime this weekend, just to be certain all
> is well with the added LV storage.
>
> IF you have LVM and have never used pvmove, you are in for treat when it
> is time to move to a larger HDD/SSD.  1 command, leave it running overnight
> regardless of whatever else is happening. In the morning, the entire PV is
> on the new storage. Beautiful thing.
>
> On 1/2/26 10:06, Solomon Peachy via Ale wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 01, 2026 at 05:27:16PM -0500, Jeff Lightner via Ale wrote:
> >> I like LVM because it allows one to quickly change layouts without
> having to
> >> undo anything.   One can add to an existing LV more easily than to
> existing
> >> partitions.   One also doesn't run up against partition boundaries
> causing
> >> issues when a new filesystem is needed.   A new LV can be added so long
> as
> >> you have space.
> >
> > Only a few days ago I had the value of LVM on a single drive laptop
> > handily demonstrated -- I migrated the contents of a LUKS-encrypted 512G
> > drive to a 1TB drive, roughly doubling the sizes of all volumes in the
> > process, without having to go through a very time-consuming parition
> > realignment.
> >
> > The longer version:
> >
> > On xmas eve a precocious youngster knocked a beverage into my open
> > laptop bag.  While Thinkpad Ts are tough, they aren't designed to be
> > partially submerbed. Magic smoke escaped.  I have nightly backups of
> > critical stuff (/etc, /var, /home) but thankfully the old drive survived
> > completely unscathed.
> >
> > /boot/efi (vfat) and /boot (ext4) were "classic" partitions; I doubled
> > their size when creating the new partitions, dumped them over.  the
> > former was resized. Then I dumped the LVM PV over, and rebooted from the
> > live USB stick into the restored system.  From there I grew the PV to
> > fill the rest of the disk, doubled the size of /'s LV, had /home use the
> > remaining space, and live-resized /, /boot, and /home.
> >
> >  From powering on the new system to being right where I left off took
> > less than an hour, including data transfer -- dd sustained 1.1GB/s,
> > limited by the NVMe<>USB dongle I was using.  That broke my brain a
> > bit...
> >
> >   - Solomon
> >
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-- 
Terror PUP a.k.a
Chuck "PUP" Payne
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