Steven Hess said the following on 02/15/2012 04:39 PM:
Can anyone point me to an explanation of how to use LVM written in terms a endluzer can understand?
A recent attempt at LVM on a 12.1 install was a disaster as it decided to touch all the other HD's with distros installed in the test machine and render it's self unbootable after a few days with an fsck error relating to a drive marked with a date in the future.
A 'how-to' will necessitate some understanding of the concepts behind LVM. Without that, its easy to make a catastrophic mess. Will them, I wonder wtf you did, since to me, after using it for a decade "its all obvious". I started, as you might see if you check the archives for my past posts on LVM, with a volume manager under AIX, and then with the LVM in suse when I started using that about a decade ago. The source paper I used was written by Michael Hasenstein, mha@suse.com, and is very clear. http://www.suse.de/cgi-bin/print_page_www.pl?NPSPath=/webredesign/htdocs/en/... http://www.suse.de/cgi-bin/print_page_www.pl?NPSPath=/webredesign/htdocs/en/... The RedHat documentation is also excellent. I find LVM very stable and consider it an essential. Yes it can be abused. One of the problems I've heard from other people is that they leave all their disks connected during an install and the installation partitioner tries to grab them all. This really has nothing to do with LVM. At this point to have to be very, very strict. As other people here have pointed out, it makes good sense to devote a partition to /boot. I make it about 150-200M (well, OK its about 300M on this machine and I've got a few more kernels than I really use) and make it ext3 or ext4. With 12.1 you may want to have / (including /usr) in a partition as well. (I have it in LVM but them I've experimented and learnt.) What I recommend then is to make the rest of the drive an extended partition and make it of type LVM. If you are doing this properly then the installation partition will 'recurse' and let you set up 'partitions' under LVM. I *strongly* suggest that you do a minimalist config - do *not* allocate all the space. Yes, LVM can span multiple partitions and multiple spindles. But if you are a newcomer to it my recommendation is *DON'T* *DO* *THAT*. Not doing it at the start won't prevent you expanding to it later when you have a better understanding and more experience. Anything that is complex can be messed up. Any tool such as YAST or the installer has to give a balance between power and flexibility. You have the power to shoot yourself in the foot, and the tool has to assume you know what you're doing. My recommendation for LVM first time users is not to use it as part of the install. Have a running system. Add a drive (or make use of the spare space on a large drive) and set up LVM there. That way you won't barf your running system. Yes there are people here who will badmouth LVM. When I drill down I find they used an early version or made some wrong assumptions or something. As with any powerful tool you need to understand the what-and-how-and-why. Given that, its fabulous and I can't imagine running serious installation without it. -- Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org