Bob S said the following on 12/03/2011 11:31 PM:
On Saturday 03 December 2011 14:35:39 Anton Aylward wrote:
Felix Miata said the following on 12/03/2011 12:00 PM:
To be sure, LVM solves some problems that should lead to less frequency of need for help with it, but for a thread like this involving a n00b who has no apparent LVM exposure, those competent and willing to provide the exposure seem to be in short supply.
Anton
A question for you. Are you running more than one OS on your machine? And if you are, are you using LVM on all of them?
Which machine? Yes, on all of them. I have a stable server running Mandriva 2001.1 with a 500G drive under LVM. This is old grub and so need a separate /boot partition. My stable Compaq laptop running openSuse 11.4 with a 80G drive under LVM. When I got the laptop it was "all Windows". I shrunk the windows partition with the openSuse installer and set up /boot, /root and LVM. Eventually I gave up the windows partition and made it into another LVM partition in the same group. I've written about the LVM layout and utilization previously on this forum. I have a third "unstable" (aka experimental) machine with a 200G drive under LVM and a much butchered grub2 that thinks it runs Fedora-15 but in fact can boot into Mint and PCLinuxOS and has LVM LVs for VMs when Fedora feels cooperative. All these share a /home which is under LVM and other /home/anton/<something> that are also under LVM. That being said, they also NFS share my ~/.thunderbird and ~/.mozilla/firefox on the laptop and some other stuff on the server. You might gather from the above that one of my disagreements with Felix is over the use of rsync. Well not quite; I think its a wonderful tool and I use it for copying across machines. When I want to back up my laptop I'll snapshot under LVM then rsync the copy across to the server. But I've learnt the hard way that since I'm not a good typist I had better use software with options that are resilient
I'll tell you why I ask. Nany years ago, SuSE 8.0 I think, I used LVM and thoughbt it was the cat's meow, until I tried yo install 8.2? maybe? with LVM also.
If I recall there were some revisions going on abut then, maybe from <1.0 to >1.0?
Tthe partioner would not allow me to set new LVM partitions for the new install. It insisted on trying to integrate them, old and new.
Do you mean during install? Where you trying to create a new volume group or new LVs in an existing group?
The details are pretty fuzzy now and maybe I was doing something wrong.
.. for various values of "wrong". You might well have a clear and sensible intent but were trying to do something the software wasn't capable of. Heck, how common is that? We all learn to live with such limitations. Unlike Bond's Aston Martin, my car isn't equipped with guns and missile launchers to take out that slow buqqer ahead ... obviously a defect in that year's model and something I'll have to complain about to GM. Often its not about "wrong" ... but about different conceptualizations. This is the problem with GUIs vs command line. The GUI may be "user friendly" but only by crippling the interface and dumbing down what the command line can do. The alternative is to have a very busy (read scary, off-putting) GUI that is really all of the command line with all the complexity and logic.
Anyway, the gist of the story is that I gave up, never looked back and to this day I just make sure that my partitions are big enough, especiall with these huge HDs we have now.
There is that. But you will also have to adopt different strategies elsewhere. As I've mentioned, having LVs of around 4G means I can back them up one by one onto DVDs. I've chosen that strategy rather than a multi-volume backup strategy. The boundaries represent logical breaks; so when, for example ~anton overflowed I could break out ~anton/Documents to a new LV. Having LVs means I can shuffle them around between spindles, between machines, experiment with striping and mirroring ... As I said to Felix, these are my decisions to suit my needs and intentions. As to those big HDs .. well I live in a house, not an aircraft hanger. If I did like in an aircraft hanger I'd still try diving the space up into rooms about the same size I have in my house. Unless, that is, I had to fit an aircraft in there. But that's me. I'm not Felix. And I think Felix is a good guy and he's helped me with other problems; the diversity of interests and ways we use Linux and what we make Linux into is a wonderful thing. -- Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species-- back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire-- has been ethically ambiguous. --Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org