William L. Thomson Jr. wrote: > On Sat, 2011-04-02 at 16:13 -0400, Kyle Gonzales wrote: >> That's what a rescue disk is for. Much simpler than breaking out and >> maintaining different partitions on your system. > > Not when your dealing with remote machines. Remote hands are not always > available. Booting into a rescue disk can be allot more work than > recovering a system using its own root partition. Which most times you > will end up having to mount root to do any work :)
Most enterprise class hardware is sourced from Dell, HP, IBM or Sun. All modern versions of these systems have remote management cards built into them for this purpose. Dell has DRAC, HP has iLo, IBM has RSA, Sun has ILOM. Dell DRAC: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/power/en/ps2q02_bell?c=us&l=en HP iLo: http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/remotemgmt.html IBM RSA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Remote_Supervisor_Adapter Sun ILOM: http://www.sun.com/systemmanagement/ilom.jsp A feature that all of these cards share is the ability to boot from remote media, some even have the ability to store a boot or rescue disk. These cards are the "remote hands" for the enterprise IT admin. When it is necessary to use this feature, it is rarely because someone munged an LVM configuration file. So yes, your solution is valid if the only concern someone has is that they messed up LVM. That is a very narrow use case. > There is no maintaining different partitions. Not to mention who needs > to resize /boot or /, those really should not grow or even be very > large. For as long as I have ever created a / partition, I have never > used more than maybe 256MB of space. Most always I partition / with > ~256MB of space, and its never fully used. At best maybe 60%. If you are breaking out many partitions from /, then perhaps you are fortunate enough to have a small root partition. I will still maintain that it introduces needless complexity for the problem you are trying to solve. > Thus there is no benefit to having partitions on lvm that do not change > in size and may never. Just becomes a potential liability and requires > the system to need things like a rescue disk to recover the system. Not > to mention some to supply that rescue disk. Unless you leave one in > every machine :P I am sorry, William, but this is completely and totally false. There are many reason to use LVM for all your partitions (save /boot, until GRUB2 becomes more commonly used). Here are just a few use cases from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Volume_Manager_(Linux) * Managing large hard disk farms by letting you add disks, replace disks, copy and share contents from one disk to another without disrupting service. * Making backups by taking "snapshots." * Creating single logical volumes of multiple physical volumes or entire hard disks (somewhat similar to RAID 0, but more similar to JBOD), allowing for dynamic volume resizing. An additional recent use case for LVM is whole disk encryption using dm-crypt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dm-crypt The only current caveat is the inability for GRUB1 to boot from LVM, requiring /boot to not be hosted on LVM. GRUB2 removes this limitation. Fedora allows users to leverage this feature from the installer, by checking the "encrypt system" box in Anaconda: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Disk_Encryption_User_Guide#Creating_Encrypted_Block_Devices_in_Anaconda For more use cases are information: http://www.markus-gattol.name/ws/lvm.html -- Kyle Gonzales [email protected] GPG Key #0x566B435B Read My Tech Blog: http://techiebloggiethingie.blogspot.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive http://marc.info/?l=jaxlug-list&r=1&w=2 RSS Feed http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml Unsubscribe [email protected]
