On 05/15/2015 09:59 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2015-05-16 03:25, Anton Aylward wrote:
I have seen people that installed the system using LVM unawares, then having problems that impeded booting, and having to reformat the disk after asking for help because nobody who understood LVM was available to help the chap. Don't make me laugh. You CAN"T install LVM "unawares". As we keep raising, its not a default. You HAVE to explicitly create it and all the LVs. Its not going to happen with the yast installer "just because....".
Yes, you can :-)
(you are unaware of novice users inventiveness :-p )
(have you not seen videos of people with their heads stuck in impossible situations, and the fire department having to tear down walls or metal whatevers to free them? :-p )
It depends on what other options you select, some combinations direct the user to LVM, or even force it. For instance, if you request full system encryption, you get LVM without asking for it. And people that do this, having a 2 TB empty hard disk, end up by having an LVM of 30 GB and the rest empty and unused. One day they get a full disk error, which surprises them hugely because they installed on an empty and huge hard disk. Where is all that space gone to? So suddenly they find out, after asking, that they have to learn how to resize LVM and filesystems. And encrypted containers.
You really want to argue both sides as seems fit. On the one hand the installer is too complicated with all its options for idiots to use and they use the defaults because they don't know any better, and on the other the idiots are going to go for a complex installation with sophisticated, non-standard, far from default settings. Perhaps I have a different view of what constitutes an "idiot". What do they say about making something idiot-proof; evolution come up with a better idiot. So we need something like a Darwin Award for computer skills. A novice asking for full encryption, seeing it requires LVM ... Perhaps what qualifies him for the Award is not stopping and asking "Hey? What's LVM"?' The issue here is inexperienced people doing complex things, well not really complex, per se, but beyond their skill level and without taking time to research and to proactive. If this were any other field, say even something as non-hi-tech as running a marathon, one simply doesn't enter it with no preparation, no practice. The people who with no background in running, no training, no understanding of how they should east, exercise, hydrate and more, just up and say "Oh, the Boston marathon is tomorrow, I'm going to run in it" after a life of driving a desk or a or long distance hauler or even a transatlantic plane are the same kind of "idiots". Sadly there's a lot that Microsoft and Apple have to shoulder the blame for. Reaching the mass-market of unsophisticated users by hiding the "complexity" behind a GUI has made everyone who sees a GUI interface think they know what's going on when they don't understand what's "under the hood". I've been doing photography for about 45 years but I understand maybe 30% of Darktable. The parts I don't understand I don't touch. PERIOD! Not for 'production'. In a 'sandbox' where the results screwing up don't matter, yes I'll experiment to learn, just as I did once with UNIX, with IP Networking and DNS, with LVM and other things I've mastered. I know how they work "under the hood" But the GUI is like ... Well most people understand cars and can drive and understand steering wheel and the gas pedal. This makes them think they can drive anything with a wheel in each corner and a steering wheel! That isn't so. 80% of the people I know here in Canada can't drive a shift. Of those that can, I think only a couple even know how to drive a shift that doesn't have have synchronizes, as is the case with some large, older trucks. And it they can't handle 4 gears and one reverse, how will they deal with a 18 forward on two shifters and five reverse? Yes, but it has a steering wheel and a wheel in each corner. The problem with GUIs is that they only let you do what the GUI designer put in there. As I've observed, Michael Hasenstein, a Suse LVM expert, commented that the Yast1 LVM GUI was much better than the YAST2 version. But that is a shortcoming of YAST2 not of LVM. In you point above you don't make it clear, and no doubt the YAST GUI hides, which of two 'whole disk' option are used. One is to use fdisk, cfdisk or equivalent to set one and only one partition with a code of 0x8e. The other is to use dd to overwrite the partition table and make the whole disk one LVM 'device' See the man page for pvcreate(8). If you expect to do something like this without RTFM && background then yes, you probably qualify as an "idiot" on the Carlos scale. At the very least winging it without RTFM means you deserve what you get when things don't do what you expect. Wrote* how much of the disk is devoted to LVM? * how much of the LVM is devoted to the LV that is going to be encrypted? Certainly I know that if I want to do this I can, and I can make ALL of a disk a single LVM store. The idea that you only get a 30G FS on an encrypted LV using LVM on a much larger disk has NOTHING to do with LVM. It may be built into the GUI, in which case blame yast, once again. It may be that the user set the 30G limit or it may be that the real "idiot" is in the GUI designer "assuming" no-one would want a encrypted FS bigger than that. Based on the information Carlos gives, we can't tell. But there is a lot of myth and assumption in the arguments people are making against LVM. That I speak at length countering them is because I'm making things very explicit. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org