Installation plays hardball

Tim ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au
Sat Jan 2 09:40:37 UTC 2010


On Fri, 2010-01-01 at 20:20 +0000, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> Clearly we have different needs. I've never needed to do any of those
> things without stopping the system. In fact the "adding space" thing
> is probably what looks most attractive, but I'm paranoid about disk
> failure so I can't see myself ever expanding a filesystem across more
> than one physical partition. I do realize that for a large multi-user
> installation with RAID drives and whatnot LVM is the bee's knees, but
> on my desktop I just make do with a judicious use of symlinks. 

It makes almost no sense to use it on laptops, where you can only have a
single drive (adding an outboard drive is quite impractical, you'd end
up with a box of bits all cabled together).  And you face the difficulty
of finding recovery tools for LVM (I haven't seen any) for any repair
jobs, but there are widely written about tools for rescuing data from
ext3 partitions.

The only advantage I found for using LVM on my laptop was encryption.  I
could have the encompassing LVM volume encrypted, and as many partitions
as I liked, and only have to unlock the outer container.  Using various
ext3 partitions, I had to type in the password numerous times to boot up
the computer.

If you're the sort that uses one huge partition for everything (and that
does seem to be the recommendation, these days), *and* you never intend
to add a second drive, then LVM is pointless to you.





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