LVM not fit for default

[Lamont Peterson]

On Friday 22 December 2006 02:48pm, Andy Green wrote:
> Lamont Peterson wrote:
> > LVM is one of the coolest things there is.  Many people don't understand
> > the basics of how & why LVM is, simply because they don't know where to
> > get the
>
> When LVM fails though, there are no recovery tools.  You can recover the
> filesystem inside an LVM (I speak from experience) but your only friends
> are dd and a hex editor.  There is no redundancy unlike genuine
> filesystems like ext2/3, if the LVM chunk before the actual filesystem
> is corrupted, the volume won't mount as LVM and that's your lot from the
> One True Way.
>
> LVM binding raided storage together makes sense and buys you something.
>   LVM being the default -- even for a laptop that cannot increase its
> permanent storage -- only has the capacity to make a crisis into a
> disaster.

On my laptops, the hard drive is quite a bit bigger than I "knew what to do 
with" at the time I installed.

For example, this notebook has an 80GB drive.  The last 20GB is WinXP, the 
first 100MB is /boot/, the next 1GB is swap and the rest is LVM (4 partitions 
total).  When I installed FC on here, I created a 512MB /, 3GB /usr/, 
256MB /var/, 128MB /var/log/, 128MB /tmp/ and 5GB /home/.

Later, I created a 2GB /var/lib/mysql/, 2GB /var/lib/pgsql/ and a 
10GB /download/.  At one point, I was playing around with a 4GB /opt/oracle/ 
and a 4GB /opt/db2/.  I once expanded /home/ to 15GB and /download/ to 10GB 
while downloading some DVD .iso files.

Even on a notebook, without RAID, I've found that being able to reallocate 
space to/from LVs to grow/shrink the filesystems has been incredibly handy.

Of course, the alternatives are use one big / partition (that sucks) or keep 
moving partitions around in order to grow/shrink filesystems (that sucks, 
too).  I think I'll stick with LVM.

BTW, I'm thinking that my next notebook just might be one of these models that 
can house 2 2.5-inch hard drives internally (not in a docking bay) and use 
LVM on RAID1.  As much traveling as I do, I have lost a couple of hard drives 
over the years (I have another that started exhibiting bad sectors just the 
other day).
-- 
Lamont Peterson <lamont at gurulabs.com>
Senior Instructor
Guru Labs, L.C. [ http://www.GuruLabs.com/ ]

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