I'm planning on replacing our WinXP server (it's just a file server) with SuSE 9.1. I plan on putting 3, 40MB drives in it and using LVM to span the disks. Since I'm not too familar with LVM, I'm interested in others experiences.
Dont you mean 40Gig? :)
Should I use LVM to span all three disks or should I put the OS on the first one and use LVM to span 2 and 3? Any tips or anything I should watch out for?
It would depend on how you partition the disks up, personally I use multiple partitions for my /boot /var and /home. Depending on where you put your shares in the samba config and how you have your disk quotas set up. Given though that a basic samba server would weigh in at about 150Megs it seems a little excessive to stick it on a single disk, personally I would set up the following /boot - 30Meg Primary /var - 2Gig Primary, depending on what else your doing on the server, or if your running logrotate you shouldnt fill this for a while. everything else but /home - 2Gig Primary /home - rest of the disk on Extended I'd then mirror the setup on the other disks with a little tweaking, so if one disk failed I could recover the server with only alot of grief and then use LVM on the /home partitions (and probably the sub-partitons within) to provide the file storage area. To be honest though 120Gigs is a little small to be running it on (although a friend does use it on his laptop), and it can be a pain to get working right. But if you want tightly controlled disk quotas and partitions, but to keep the flexibility without having to fsck the disk every couple of weeks then its ideal. Regards, Ben