Hi everybody, I am a long term Debian user (since 1996, actually). I am about to set up a new debian server using Lenny, which will go into production probably in October. This machine will use lighttpd, mysql, dovecot/postfix among others.
Currently I use two harddisks and MD for all servers to guard against harddisk failure, and to gain additional read speed. For the new machine, I would like to try LVM2 but after spending a week browsing Google and news articles, I am a bit confused. There are two things I want to achieve: 1. guard against harddisk failure, get notified (by mail / SMS / whateveR) when one fails MD does this beautifully and my current server has had a few harddisk failures which were all handled very well. 2. [NEW] do backups using snapshots, to minimize downtime for backups. I have read LVM2 does this very well, currently I have to shutdown everything for backups (nightly), which basically sucks. I do NOT need dynamic resizing of partitions. My current server is (still) an updated Sarge installation , running since Sarge was "testing", and it has never felt the need to add space. I will have two 400GB disks in the new machine which will be far more than I need (currently I have 2x160GB of which 75GB are used). I would like something like the following setup: 10GB root, 2GB swap, 4GB tmp, 10GB /var, and the rest for data. All mirrored 1:1 on both disks. If possible, I would like to use a stock kernel (no self-compiles) and stock Debian utilities, to ease upgrades. Questions: -- Generally: Is it a good idea to use LVM2 mirroring or should I stick to MD for mirroring, and use LVM only for the snapshots? This seems overcomplicated. -- Can Lenny create and use mirrored LVM partitions? I tried a test installation in VMware but the installer does not offer a mirroring feature, only encryption. -- Can Lenny's boot manager install itself on both mirrored harddisks' MBRs and boot from both? -- Can Lenny boot from a LVM2 logical volume? -- Lenny does not seem to contain 'dmeventd', which (I heard) is necessary to detect disk failures and deactivate failed mirrors, like 'mdadm' did with 'md'. Can it, or should it, be added, or is there an alternative way of doing this? Generally I would like to hear any experiences with LVM2 you can offer. The last time I tried LVM I hosed everything, but that was eight years ago, at least partly due to a user error, and with LVM1 on Debian Woody with a self-compiled kernel on 2.4.2x. Thank you! Jens -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]