On Mar 2, 2014, at 9:35 PM, Nathanael Noblet <nathanael(a)gnat.ca> wrote:
On 03/01/2014 04:57 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> The servers were rented with a Fedora produced default/automatic/guided partitioning
layout? If not, your example is out of scope. We are only talking about this context
specifically, not arbitrary examples for shrinking a file system. The Fedora
automatic/guided partition layout is a rootfs of 50GB, and any significant additional
space goes to a separate /home. So you're saying you'd shrink a 50GB rootfs for
encrypted data, rather than blow away the /home LV, make a new LV, encrypt it, then format
it?
They were CentOS 6 machines. So perhaps the defaults are different however this is
something that happened to me and not being able to shrink a fs would have been
problematic / costly for me. Granted the default there was /boot / and swap so I had a
900G / and nothing else thus the shrinking of the / fs. So I suppose that if the servers
were fedora and had a /home LV this particular situation wouldn't have been an issue.
I just wanted to point out that shrinking a partition is a valid use case is all. In our
current default fedora layout I could still accomplish what I needed. But shrinking a fs
is a valid use case…
Fair enough, and I'm not suggesting shrink is invalid for that matter. I merely want
to understand the actual requirement because there may be better ways to address it.
Given the XFS shrinking issue it might even be nice to not allocate ALL storage, create
/, swap and /home without taking up all storage and then let people enlarge what they
need…
It's an interesting suggestion. But does this really apply to the target audience of
users who are a.) using a GUI installer, and b.) choosing to use an automatic/guided
partitioning layout? Is that sort of user likely to jump into a resize operation from the
command line post-install? Why wouldn't they just use Manual Partitioning?
What you suggest might seem plausible for Server. But I don't think that's a good
idea for Workstation, to burden the user with an incomplete partition layout that
(silently) proposes they complete or customize it post-install.
Chris Murphy