lvm

Mon Mar 5 05:11:31 UTC 2012

On Mon, 2012-03-05 at 00:56 +0100, Reindl Harald wrote: 
> 
> Am 05.03.2012 00:35, schrieb Peter Larsen:
> > We're not longer using legacy grub. Even with F14 we shipped Grub2 (it
> > may even have been included earlier - not sure). We've had this ability
> > for a long time now.
> 
> uninteresting in this context
> you shipped and it was good to have a sepearte /boot

Let's try to keep to the subject. We're talking about a current Fedora -
to understand why we did things we did in the past, we need to know what
changed. So it's definitely on topic to discuss the difference between
legacy grub and grub2.

> 
> you and i do not know the future and somewhere in
> time there will be ext5 and GRUB2 not support it
> who knows?

Again, if we stick to the subject of talking about the current release,
we have a very defined abilities and consequences. Trying to plan for
something you and I don't know about is quite fruitless. 

> 
> i am one of the people not reinstall their systems
> because i am moving around disks between new and old
> and the most interesting ones re even not physicasl

In that you're definitely in the minority. In particular when it comes
to Fedora. Going from one major version to another on the OS means you
have to rethink what you're doing. What worked yesterday may not be what
works today. There was a time I formatted everything with FAT; there was
another time where ext2 was good enough - but as we have progressed and
our technology gets better, I've adapted. To me that's what Fedora is
all about. It would defeat the purpose of using Fedora if I didn't adapt
to the "new way" of doing things. Otherwise, how would we find out what
works and what doesn't?

> 
> >> as i installed my systems with a 500 MB /boot there
> >> was no imagination that ext4 can be relevant in the
> >> future, but as it was released it was easy to use
> >> it for system/data
> > 
> > And the fact that we increased the requirement from 200 to 
> > 500MB never caused you issues? 
> 
> which requirement?

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_PreUpgrade#Not_enough_space_in_.2Fboot

That requirement. 

> /dev/sda1     ext4    189M   40M  150M  21% /boot
> 2.6.42.7-1.fc15.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Feb 21 01:22:05 UTC 2012

I may suggest you try a new install now and then and see what has
changed. 500MB is the default size for /boot and has been for the last
few releases. And yes, it has to do with pre-upgrade requirements.
Personally I think it could have been solved in a different manner, but
it's what we ended up with.

> 
> well, majority of my machines are VMware ESX guests
> /boot is there even a own disk

And with that you certainly got far from what the average Fedora user
does.

> so increase what you like
> 
> * shutdown
> * klick -> drag
> * gparted
> * upgrade

Well, with LVM you don't even have to shutdown.
lvresize is all you need.

> > So because of this uncertainty, you want to pick the least flexible
> > setup as default and "not dumb"? Seems to me, that it should be the
> > other way around.
> 
> /boot is for the fucking bootloader and the kernel
> this is not for a entire operating system
> so if this needs ever more than 500 MB some
> poor people made big mistakes

We're not in total disagreement there. But it's where we are now. Every
new install will default to 500MB for /boot - and if you try to run an
upgrade and only have 200MB you're more than likely end up with
problems. It's quite a common issue on #fedora.

> 
> >> but you can setup your systems with the expierence
> >> of the past or ignore it and hope all will be fine
> > 
> > I'm not ignoring anything. You seem to be though.
> 
> i am the one who upgraded his last machine
> from Fedora 5 until Fedora 14 and maintaining
> 20 servers originally installed with F9, currently
> on F15

Well, I'm happy that succeeded for you. I've not always been that lucky.
So today I find myself wiping all by /home and reinstalling. Although I
have a F14->F16 upgrade where I didn't do that and it almost runs with
no hitches - almost :)

> 
> >> i chose smater setups and ignoring defaults made
> >> for "click, next,c lick, next" users
> > 
> > You've yet to explain why it's smarter to be static and unflexible, on
> > top of not having the availability of snapshot backups and other
> > features provided by LVM.
> 
> because my snapshots are mostly done on VMware ESX level and
> on workstations i am pretty fine with my RAID10, complexer
> things are even their in virtual machines because the have
> much more snapshot/backup/restore capabilities

Again, you're way beyond normal usage for Fedora. The fact you're using
it as a server base seems to be rather odd to me - but if you like
living life on the edge, be my guest :)  The problem with ESX however
is, that your snapshot doesn't include memory/cache. Backup, space
management and VM (kvm) works extremely well with LVM - as a matter of
fact, it's how we use Open Source to create VM snapshots :)

> and yes on the workstation the disks are flexible by size
> /dev/md2      ext4    3,7T  1,6T  2,1T  44% /mnt/data

I've been a fan of mdraid for a long time. Although I once lost a mirror
after a bad upgrade. But it's years ago and was with Centos - can't even
blame Fedora for that one ;)

-- 
Best Regards
  Peter Larsen

Wise words of the day:
* SynrG notes that the number of configuration questions to answer in sendmail
  is NON-TRIVIAL
	-- Seen on #Debian
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