[linux-lvm] LVM and Ghost

[Clint Byrum]

On Wed, 2004-09-01 at 11:00, James P wrote:
> Some of our admins are running into trouble running Norton Ghost on 
> our RHEL ES 3.0 boxes. Ghost claims it doesn't recognize what's on 
> the disk so it just does a raw dump of the entire (36 Gig) disk. 
> This offers practically zero compression, so we're getting ghost 
> images that are many times larger than the amount of actual used 
> space on the machine.
> 
> The only difference I can think of between these machines and our 
> other Linux boxes that ghost perfectly well is that these are using 
> LVM. Is this causing the problem with Ghost? Has anyone else run 
> into this? What can we do to get Ghost to recognize where the data 
> is on the disk so we can get some sort of reasonably sized images? 
> Anything?
> 

Yes this is a Ghost problem. Ghost has no idea what LVM is. To it, LVM
appears as an unknown filesystem. You'll have to ask symantec to add LVM
support.

Just curious.. why even use ghost with RH Linux servers? I suppose
multicasting everything is nice.. but a two step process where you use a
kickstart for the install, and then a multicast file copy program (like
mcp, http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/kj234/mcp/) for any data would at
least let you use free tools to accomplish your goal, and not leave you
hanging when you switch filesystems. ;)