Re: Getting rid of /boot
Marc Wilson wrote: On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Robert Nichols rnicholsnos...@comcast.net wrote: This sounds like you've been doing your installs from a Live CD, where your options are indeed quite limited. The installation CD set or DVD includes a perfectly good partitioning tool that allows you to set up partitions and mount points pretty much any way you want, and also allows you to switch to a text console and run 'fdisk' if you need to rearrange an existing partitioning scheme. Exactly. I've never seen any use at all for live CD's, I don't know what Fedora includes in one or even if they include any sort of partitioning tool at all. I have found that if /boot is not created, a change within caused MBR to be relocated and and will not boot. So, I stuck with that model. However, perhaps using lvm, this may not be an issue but I will stick to what I know and can control completely being an old hat. ;) For me, gparted is quite useful for multiboot partitions. I have created 15 partitions (3 primaries for windows, and 12 logical partitions for boot-master, swap, Fedora9/11/12, other distros, LinuxApps, NTFS Apps) and it works well. Note: boot-master is the primary grub master that sees other the slave boot partitions for each linux distro. The real snag about gparted is if you resize and move partitions afterwards, you can get into wierd gotchas! where gparted fails to correctly resize/move logical partitions and leaves 8MB of unallocated gaps due to 'rounding to cylinders' and it is sometimes impossible to recollect (with gparted). But that is just an annoyance and it does not seems to hurt anything AFAIK and I don't know for sure, if this affects pre-upgrades or anaconda, in this case. Another major pain of gparted is if you delete and create a partition in the middle, gparted seems to assign this new partition within to the highest available partition number, down shifting all partitions above it, and ends up creating an out of sequence partition, which causes pre-upgrades/anaconda to barf. If you do this, you have to delete all logical partitions above the deleted middle partition and rebuild these partitions from another disk or from backups. I tried this for myself and discovered this quite painfully and posted this observation some time ago (about gparted quirks). So what I do, is to create 15 partitions and do not delete any logical partitions in the middle, seems to be good personal rule (so far) and you can still resize/move/reformat the drives and it seems to work. When after having the 1st drive done in this way, and later adding a 2nd drive, gparted is useful when creating a backup drive for whatever reason (my case was a failing drive), from which I can dd (or ddrescue, or ghost backup/restore for windows) to the 2nd drive and it works. I have found however using rsync/cp/tar/... one is recommended to SeLinux relabel and even so, there were other problems, (which I will decline to mention because it is too numerous and obscure) and I found that dd/ddrescue works perfectly (or in case of sector errors, ddrescue if you are lucky) - so I believe rsync/cp/tar/... does not preserve file attributes, but this is my general observation, having done this for myself. FWIW, Dan -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
And I was just about to ask what exactly is broken downstream... :-) I've been driving several Fedora versions on several machines for several years now with a custom-partitioned disks (simple setups, typically just swap, / and /home, no LVM or anything such), and nothing downstream seemed broken, ever. Question: with /boot / and /home partitions, do /usr /etc /var and others all go into directories in / I've never found out how the partitioning and install systems handle this. Roger -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Tue, 2009-12-08 at 00:53 +1100, Roger wrote: Question: with /boot / and /home partitions, do /usr /etc /var and others all go into directories in / I've never found out how the partitioning and install systems handle this. As far as accessing them is concerned, they're all directories inside /. Now, they could be ordinary directories, or other disks/partitions mounted onto directories. But they all apear like directories. For simplicity's sake, you might use just directories in /. For reliabilities sake, they may be mount points for different drives, with different mounting options (read-only, etc.). Back in the earlier days of non-gigabyte drives, using different drives per mount might have been advantageous for sizing reasons, alone. When creating the file structure, you'd make a root partition, and create all the directories. If you were using partitions, then you'd create them, mount them into /. Then you'd start putting files on. -- [...@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On 12/04/2009 01:33 PM, Terry Polzin wrote: On Friday 04 December 2009 14:55, Eric Brunson wrote: According to it's website documentation grub has supported LVM for the past few minor releases. Is there any initiative to move /boot in LVM? Wondering, e. Sure would be a good thing, when /boot needs more space to complete some upgrade scenarios. That's exactly what prompted me to ask. I had space issues on three different machines with preupgrade. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On 12/04/2009 04:56 PM, Marc Wilson wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Eric Brunsonbrun...@brunson.com wrote: According to it's website documentation grub has supported LVM for the past few minor releases. Is there any initiative to move /boot in LVM? Can't imagine there's any reason for it, when all you have to do is structure the system reasonably in the first place. All the failed upgrade scenarios (why do people bother with preupgrade in the first place?) seem to involve people thinking they know better than the automated partitioning tools. Why add the complexity? Actually, my installations all took the default 200MB /boot partition. I use preupgrade because, in general, it's awesome. Why don't you ask the developers why they bothered writing it. If the size of /boot wasn't an issue, I would have had no problems at all with preupgrade. As far as I'm concerned, it removes complexity. What was most interesting to me during the investigation to a workaround was just how simple preupgrade is. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 9:20 PM, Gene Heskett gene.hesk...@verizon.net wrote: I need to install F12 here at some point, and it sure would be a hell of a lot easier if F10 had enough libraries installed to run gparted to prepare a drive the way _I_ want it and tell anaconda to go pound sand. For instance, why will it not accept a /boot partition specified for more than 199 megabytes? Why will it not accept a separate /root partition? Why will it not accept a separate /var partition? Or a separate /etc partition? I did all of those things with the *installer*. IMHO if you've already decided you need to use gparted before you get started, you're part of the problem, not the solution. -- Marc Wilson m...@cox.net -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sunday 06 December 2009 02:27:34 Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote: Marko Vojinovic vvma...@gmail.com writes: And I was just about to ask what exactly is broken downstream... :-) I've been driving several Fedora versions on several machines for several years now with a custom-partitioned disks (simple setups, typically just swap, / and /home, no LVM or anything such), and nothing downstream seemed broken, ever. AFAICS, it is completely safe to not use LVM if you know you won't be resizing partitions afterwards. And life is simpler if the hard drive starts dying or something... ;-) Did you get selinux working or did you just turn it off in frustration becauce putting thing in non-default places broke the stock selinux policies? I rarely ever put files in non-default places. And when I do, SELinux yells at me, but then it is typically a matter of one chcon and one semanage command to make the whole thing legal and persistent. It does not take any more work than fixing ordinary Linux permissions when putting things in non-default places. And there is setroubleshoot which basically tells you exactly what commands to execute. I can only wish for a similar tool to tell me do a chmod 755 some.file and chown -R myuser.thatgroup /thosefiles if you want to grant access to whatever you are doing. Basically the only thing one can see is a permission denied message in the prompt or a pop-up window, and I have to figure out myself how to fix it. SELinux is more user-friendly in this respect. :-) Of course, whenever I do something like this, I take a couple of minutes to get educated what exactly I'm doing and why. Over time, I learned how to deal with it with less and less effort. Best, :-) Marko -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sunday 06 December 2009 16:41:59 Marko Vojinovic wrote: On Sunday 06 December 2009 02:27:34 Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote: Marko Vojinovic vvma...@gmail.com writes: And I was just about to ask what exactly is broken downstream... :-) I've been driving several Fedora versions on several machines for several years now with a custom-partitioned disks (simple setups, typically just swap, / and /home, no LVM or anything such), and nothing downstream seemed broken, ever. AFAICS, it is completely safe to not use LVM if you know you won't be resizing partitions afterwards. And life is simpler if the hard drive starts dying or something... ;-) Did you get selinux working or did you just turn it off in frustration becauce putting thing in non-default places broke the stock selinux policies? I rarely ever put files in non-default places. And also, I have never had a situation where SELinux would complain to a custom layout of partitions. It doesn't operate on that layer, AFAIK. Best, :-) Marko -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sunday 06 December 2009, Marc Wilson wrote: On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 9:20 PM, Gene Heskett gene.hesk...@verizon.net wrote: I need to install F12 here at some point, and it sure would be a hell of a lot easier if F10 had enough libraries installed to run gparted to prepare a drive the way _I_ want it and tell anaconda to go pound sand. For instance, why will it not accept a /boot partition specified for more than 199 megabytes? Why will it not accept a separate /root partition? Why will it not accept a separate /var partition? Or a separate /etc partition? I did all of those things with the *installer*. IMHO if you've already decided you need to use gparted before you get started, you're part of the problem, not the solution. I sincerely don't believe so Marc, so I'm going to call your bluff a wee bit. If and when fedora actually gives us a working partitioning tool that doesn't suffer from the entirely false limitations imposed by fedora, I'll use it. But when I move a fedora install with rsync -avc to a drive partitioned the way I want it, and its at least 2x faster when done, then something is very seriously broken in the fedora approved version. And that IS the end of the discussion at this campfire gathering. If you know how to make the 'installer' partition a drive according to your wishes without its refusing to accept say a 400 Mbyte /boot partition, or demanding that /root /var MUST live on /, then please write up a downloadable, printable PDF on how to do that since that data to guide one around the fedora imposed toll gates is not available during the install. Do so, let us know where it can be pulled from and I will gladly, gleefully kill a tree. And should we ever meet, the first 3 are on me. ;) -- Cheers, Gene There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them. https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp Let me put it this way: today is going to be a learning experience. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
Gene Heskett wrote: If you know how to make the 'installer' partition a drive according to your wishes without its refusing to accept say a 400 Mbyte /boot partition, or demanding that /root /var MUST live on /, then please write up a downloadable, printable PDF on how to do that since that data to guide one around the fedora imposed toll gates is not available during the install. Do so, let us know where it can be pulled from and I will gladly, gleefully kill a tree. And should we ever meet, the first 3 are on me. ;) This sounds like you've been doing your installs from a Live CD, where your options are indeed quite limited. The installation CD set or DVD includes a perfectly good partitioning tool that allows you to set up partitions and mount points pretty much any way you want, and also allows you to switch to a text console and run 'fdisk' if you need to rearrange an existing partitioning scheme. You do have to select Create custom layout in the first partitioning dialog. The only problems I've ever run into with the built-in partitioning tool is its refusal to deal with anomalies such as partitions not in physical disk order or the use of limit capacity jumpers back in the days of disks larger than what the BIOS would support. -- Bob Nichols NOSPAM is really part of my email address. Do NOT delete it. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Robert Nichols rnicholsnos...@comcast.net wrote: This sounds like you've been doing your installs from a Live CD, where your options are indeed quite limited. The installation CD set or DVD includes a perfectly good partitioning tool that allows you to set up partitions and mount points pretty much any way you want, and also allows you to switch to a text console and run 'fdisk' if you need to rearrange an existing partitioning scheme. Exactly. I've never seen any use at all for live CD's, I don't know what Fedora includes in one or even if they include any sort of partitioning tool at all. -- Marc Wilson m...@cox.net -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sunday 06 December 2009, Robert Nichols wrote: Gene Heskett wrote: If you know how to make the 'installer' partition a drive according to your wishes without its refusing to accept say a 400 Mbyte /boot partition, or demanding that /root /var MUST live on /, then please write up a downloadable, printable PDF on how to do that since that data to guide one around the fedora imposed toll gates is not available during the install. Do so, let us know where it can be pulled from and I will gladly, gleefully kill a tree. And should we ever meet, the first 3 are on me. ;) This sounds like you've been doing your installs from a Live CD, where your options are indeed quite limited. The installation CD set or DVD includes a perfectly good partitioning tool that allows you to set up partitions and mount points pretty much any way you want, and also allows you to switch to a text console and run 'fdisk' if you need to rearrange an existing partitioning scheme. You do have to select Create custom layout in the first partitioning dialog. I always have done so, but it still nags, or just loops, rejecting the changes if it doesn't like them. The only problems I've ever run into with the built-in partitioning tool is its refusal to deal with anomalies such as partitions not in physical disk order or the use of limit capacity jumpers back in the days of disks larger than what the BIOS would support. -- Cheers, Gene There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them. https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp If we all work together, we can totally disrupt the system. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sunday 06 December 2009, Marc Wilson wrote: On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Robert Nichols rnicholsnos...@comcast.net wrote: This sounds like you've been doing your installs from a Live CD, where your options are indeed quite limited. The installation CD set or DVD includes a perfectly good partitioning tool that allows you to set up partitions and mount points pretty much any way you want, and also allows you to switch to a text console and run 'fdisk' if you need to rearrange an existing partitioning scheme. Exactly. I've never seen any use at all for live CD's, I don't know what Fedora includes in one or even if they include any sort of partitioning tool at all. Sorry, been using the dvd's now since about FC2. And I have been bitching about the broken partitioning tools for at least that long. This time I'm going to try the 64 bit versions since this box now has a 4 core phenom. -- Cheers, Gene There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them. https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp If we all work together, we can totally disrupt the system. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 5:07 PM, Gene Heskett gene.hesk...@verizon.net wrote: On Sunday 06 December 2009, Robert Nichols wrote: This sounds like you've been doing your installs from a Live CD, where I always have done so, but it still nags, or just loops, rejecting the changes if it doesn't like them. Then the easy answer is not to do so, since it does not do what you want, and you end up with all this other extra work you describe. -- Marc Wilson m...@cox.net posgu...@gmail.com -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sunday 06 December 2009, Marc Wilson wrote: On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 5:07 PM, Gene Heskett gene.hesk...@verizon.net wrote: On Sunday 06 December 2009, Robert Nichols wrote: This sounds like you've been doing your installs from a Live CD, where I always have done so, but it still nags, or just loops, rejecting the changes if it doesn't like them. Then the easy answer is not to do so, since it does not do what you want, and you end up with all this other extra work you describe. The point is, why won't it let me partition as I see as the best way for me? Are you started on the tutorial yet? :-) -- Cheers, Gene There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them. https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp Victory or defeat! -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
Matthew Saltzman wrote: Actually, the complexity is that Fedora for some insane reason still defaults to using LVM for everything *other* than /boot. This brings no benefit to most users. Well, it means I can have separate filesystems for things that I don't want overwritten if I reinstall (/home, /usr/local, /opt, /var/www, etc.) That's only 4, or 7 with / , /boot and swap. How do you get up to 15? In any case, the default partitioning doesn't give you 15 partitions, so this seems an odd reason for recommending it. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
Ryan Lynch wrote: Actually, the complexity is that Fedora for some insane reason still defaults to using LVM for everything *other* than /boot. This brings no benefit to most users. With all due respect, the fact that one of us can't imagine the need for some technology doesn't say much, one way or another, about whether a general use case exists. In general, I find this attitude amusing, but you may have a point W.R.T. LVM. As far as I can see, the poster was not objecting to LVM per se; he was simply asserting that it should not be the default, which I agree with. I was an LVM fan for some time, but ran into an insoluble problem a couple of years ago, where some kind of corruption preventing me accessing my LVM partitions. I came to the conclusion that the disadvantages of LVM far outweighed the advantages. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote: But the point is taken. There seem to be quite a few posts from folks that make their lives needlessly complex by mucking with the defaults and that ends up breaking something downstream. Are you saying that something is broken downstream if you don't use LVM? With respect, that is nonsense. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Saturday 05 December 2009 13:43:52 Timothy Murphy wrote: Matthew Saltzman wrote: Actually, the complexity is that Fedora for some insane reason still defaults to using LVM for everything *other* than /boot. This brings no benefit to most users. Well, it means I can have separate filesystems for things that I don't want overwritten if I reinstall (/home, /usr/local, /opt, /var/www, etc.) That's only 4, or 7 with / , /boot and swap. How do you get up to 15? Multiboot with various Windows, Ubuntu's, other Fedora's? Each should have its own /, at least. That said, if one does not work in multi-platform software development, I totally agree that cluttering the disk with all that stuff is very ugly, at the very least. These days virtual machines are much cleaner and easier to maintain than multiboot setups. Best, :-) Marko -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Saturday 05 December 2009 13:52:36 Timothy Murphy wrote: Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote: But the point is taken. There seem to be quite a few posts from folks that make their lives needlessly complex by mucking with the defaults and that ends up breaking something downstream. Are you saying that something is broken downstream if you don't use LVM? With respect, that is nonsense. And I was just about to ask what exactly is broken downstream... :-) I've been driving several Fedora versions on several machines for several years now with a custom-partitioned disks (simple setups, typically just swap, / and /home, no LVM or anything such), and nothing downstream seemed broken, ever. AFAICS, it is completely safe to not use LVM if you know you won't be resizing partitions afterwards. And life is simpler if the hard drive starts dying or something... ;-) Best, :-) Marko -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 8:17 AM, Marko Vojinovic vvma...@gmail.com wrote: On Saturday 05 December 2009 13:52:36 Timothy Murphy wrote: Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote: But the point is taken. There seem to be quite a few posts from folks that make their lives needlessly complex by mucking with the defaults and that ends up breaking something downstream. Are you saying that something is broken downstream if you don't use LVM? With respect, that is nonsense. And I was just about to ask what exactly is broken downstream... :-) I've been driving several Fedora versions on several machines for several years now with a custom-partitioned disks (simple setups, typically just swap, / and /home, no LVM or anything such), and nothing downstream seemed broken, ever. AFAICS, it is completely safe to not use LVM if you know you won't be resizing partitions afterwards. And life is simpler if the hard drive starts dying or something... ;-) Assuming the LVM or no-LVM decision is not negotiable, perhaps it would be better to work on improving tools such as system-config-lvm to abstract less experienced users from the complexity? While s-c-lvm is functional it has a lot of room for improvement. One problem in particular I ran into is that if you use s-c-lvm to create a volume group on a new disk it creates a whole disk volume group which is still incompatible with anaconda. Since the LVM wiki recommends creating a partition first I submitted a bug against s-c-lvm which was summarily closed since it is technically a problem with anaconda. Now two Fedora releases later I still have to install with the default /home and map it in manually. Sorry I'm heading off topic into a rant but I find it frustrating that there is a compatibility issue between two redhat/fedora applications that is still a problem a year later. I know it's not a problem many people will run into but the fact one program does something that creates an incompatibility with another program from the same company/group to me should make it important to fix. Anyway, I'm done, I feel better, now back to our regularly scheduled topic... Richard -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sat, 5 Dec 2009 14:04:05 + Marko Vojinovic wrote: That said, if one does not work in multi-platform software development, I totally agree that cluttering the disk with all that stuff is very ugly, at the very least. These days virtual machines are much cleaner and easier to maintain than multiboot setups. Yea, but the reason we made a multi-boot system at work was to compare the performance of real hardware to virtual machines. Running testbeds for for our tools (especially the debugger) seems to disclose lots of funny behavior (especially on what is now an older version of xen). KVM seems to be much less screwy. I definitely think upgrading the old xen machine to a newer OS and kvm will be something we want to do soon. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sat, 5 Dec 2009 08:39:10 -0600 Richard Shaw wrote: Assuming the LVM or no-LVM decision is not negotiable, perhaps it would be better to work on improving tools such as system-config-lvm to abstract less experienced users from the complexity? While s-c-lvm is functional it has a lot of room for improvement. Or maybe just work on improving the quality of the cryptic jargon so people don't just throw up their hands when presented with yet another linux new and therefore better 89 degree slope learning curve :-). -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 20:17 -0500, Ryan Lynch wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 20:13, Matthew Saltzman m...@clemson.edu wrote: Well, it means I can have separate filesystems for things that I don't want overwritten if I reinstall (/home, /usr/local, /opt, /var/www, etc.) and I can dynamically resize them if they get unbalanced. That's pretty useful. Out of curiousity, what filesystem do you use to get dynamic shrinking? Sorry if I wasn't clear--by dynamic I didn't mean online, though AFAICT from reading docs, ext filesystems can be resized online. But I can shrink an ext filesystem and the LV that contains it, then expand a different LV and the fielsystem on it, without having to move the partitions so that the space is contiguous. Way more convenient than the alternative. -Ryan -- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Daniel B. Thurman d...@cdkkt.com wrote: On SATA, it is 15. On IDE it's 24? Not sure about PATA. I'd like to see documentation supporting the idea that the data structures ON the disk are somehow tied to the underlying interface technology, please. -- Marc Wilson m...@cox.net -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 5:50 AM, Timothy Murphy gayle...@eircom.net wrote: As far as I can see, the poster was not objecting to LVM per se; he was simply asserting that it should not be the default, which I agree with. The original objection was mine, and that is absolutely correct. Just because some technology exists, is not a good and sufficient reason to use it as a default. LVM brings nothing but confusion to most users. -- Marc Wilson m...@cox.net -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Saturday 05 December 2009, Timothy Murphy wrote: Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote: But the point is taken. There seem to be quite a few posts from folks that make their lives needlessly complex by mucking with the defaults and that ends up breaking something downstream. Are you saying that something is broken downstream if you don't use LVM? With respect, that is nonsense. Folderol even. My objection to LVM is two fold. 1. It won't allow one to save things in the /home tree when doing an upgrade or re-install. I have an almost 10GB corpus of email, and several scripts that are needed for my daily operations that need to be preserved. LVM makes that impossible. 2. Its another point of failure that will indeed fail at some point. Every LVM install I've let anaconda do, has led to a failure and a total re-install at some point. The last was a drive failure, but I was able to rsync the important stuff to another fresh drive with 8 or 9 partitions I setup with gparted, moved the drive to sda, ran a fresh grub-install and everything is ok. The machine is noticeably faster too without the LVM crap between a button click and results. LVM is a solution looking for a problem I've never had, and its a solution that is way too easily contaminated IMNSHO. As for the subject line, you would have to be out of your mind to want to expose /boot to the various illnesses LVM can be infected with entirely too easily. -- Cheers, Gene There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them. https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp Espy be careful, some twit might quote you Espy out of context... -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On 12/04/2009 06:49 PM, Marc Wilson wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Tom Horsley tom.hors...@att.net wrote: Because you can only have a max of 15 partitions on a disk without using LVM? The maximum number is 24, not 15. From devices.txt in the kernel documentation: 3 blockFirst MFM, RLL and IDE hard disk/CD-ROM interface 0 = /dev/hdaMaster: whole disk (or CD-ROM) 64 = /dev/hdbSlave: whole disk (or CD-ROM) For partitions, add to the whole disk device number: 0 = /dev/hd? Whole disk 1 = /dev/hd?1First partition 2 = /dev/hd?2Second partition ... 63 = /dev/hd?63 63rd partition For Linux/i386, partitions 1-4 are the primary partitions, and 5 and above are logical partitions. Other versions of Linux use partitioning schemes appropriate to their respective architectures. 8 blockSCSI disk devices (0-15) 0 = /dev/sdaFirst SCSI disk whole disk 16 = /dev/sdbSecond SCSI disk whole disk 32 = /dev/sdcThird SCSI disk whole disk ... 240 = /dev/sdpSixteenth SCSI disk whole disk Partitions are handled in the same way as for IDE disks (see major number 3) except that the limit on partitions is 15. Because the drives are using the SCSI high level driver, any partition above 15 will not be recognized by Fedora. Mikkel -- Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup! signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 11:30 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: Folderol even. My objection to LVM is two fold. 1. It won't allow one to save things in the /home tree when doing an upgrade or re-install. I have an almost 10GB corpus of email, and several scripts that are needed for my daily operations that need to be preserved. LVM makes that impossible. Can you elaborate? I use LVM on all my systems, and whenever I move to a new Fedora release I carry the old /home tree forward to the new installation. Wayne. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On 12/05/2009 10:08 AM, Marc Wilson wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Daniel B. Thurman d...@cdkkt.com wrote: On SATA, it is 15. On IDE it's 24? Not sure about PATA. I'd like to see documentation supporting the idea that the data structures ON the disk are somehow tied to the underlying interface technology, please. They are not. But the high level driver only supports x number of partitions. Because the SCSI top level drivers are being used, only 15 partitions are usable, regardless of the number being defined. Also, the DOS partition table is not the only one supported. You can also access the drive without any partition table. You will find that you can format /dev/sdb, and then mount /dev/sdb on a mount point. I used /dev/sdb, but you can do it with any drive. But because most people have their Linux install already on /dev/sda, using /dev/sda would cause problems... :) Mikkel -- Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup! signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Saturday 05 December 2009, Wayne Feick wrote: On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 11:30 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: Folderol even. My objection to LVM is two fold. 1. It won't allow one to save things in the /home tree when doing an upgrade or re-install. I have an almost 10GB corpus of email, and several scripts that are needed for my daily operations that need to be preserved. LVM makes that impossible. Can you elaborate? I use LVM on all my systems, and whenever I move to a new Fedora release I carry the old /home tree forward to the new installation. Wayne. And just how do you do that? The last time I tried to save /home, anaconda would not proceed until I checked the format it box. As I'm an alpha test site for amanda, the recovery was doable and was done, but what kind of twisted reasoning gives anaconda the right to demand I destroy my data? -- Cheers, Gene There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them. https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp By the yard, life is hard. By the inch, it's a cinch. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
2009/12/5 Gene Heskett gene.hesk...@verizon.net: And just how do you do that? The last time I tried to save /home, anaconda would not proceed until I checked the format it box. I did not have this problem when I upgraded to F11 a couple weeks ago. I always wait for a respin but that wasn't possible this time. Is this yet another reason not to bother with F12 yet? -- Marc Wilson m...@cox.net posgu...@gmail.com -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 13:43 +, Timothy Murphy wrote: Matthew Saltzman wrote: Actually, the complexity is that Fedora for some insane reason still defaults to using LVM for everything *other* than /boot. This brings no benefit to most users. Well, it means I can have separate filesystems for things that I don't want overwritten if I reinstall (/home, /usr/local, /opt, /var/www, etc.) That's only 4, or 7 with / , /boot and swap. How do you get up to 15? I don't (for systems with just one Linux installed). Add Windows (two partitions if you want separate system and data disks) and another *nix OS, though, and you're pressing the limit. In any case, the default partitioning doesn't give you 15 partitions, so this seems an odd reason for recommending it. I don't recommend the default because it dumps everything into a single / filesystem, so reinstalling wipes out things that I'd want to preserve. I tend to use LVM for flexibility resizing. I don't spread LVs across devices though. -- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 12:33 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: On Saturday 05 December 2009, Wayne Feick wrote: On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 11:30 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: Folderol even. My objection to LVM is two fold. 1. It won't allow one to save things in the /home tree when doing an upgrade or re-install. I have an almost 10GB corpus of email, and several scripts that are needed for my daily operations that need to be preserved. LVM makes that impossible. Can you elaborate? I use LVM on all my systems, and whenever I move to a new Fedora release I carry the old /home tree forward to the new installation. Wayne. And just how do you do that? The last time I tried to save /home, anaconda would not proceed until I checked the format it box. As I'm an alpha test site for amanda, the recovery was doable and was done, but what kind of twisted reasoning gives anaconda the right to demand I destroy my data? I usually just install with no separate filesystem for /home (i.e. it's part of /) and then once the install is complete I update /etc/fstab to mount my old /home filesystem on the new installation. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 12:33 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: On Saturday 05 December 2009, Wayne Feick wrote: On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 11:30 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: Folderol even. My objection to LVM is two fold. 1. It won't allow one to save things in the /home tree when doing an upgrade or re-install. I have an almost 10GB corpus of email, and several scripts that are needed for my daily operations that need to be preserved. LVM makes that impossible. Can you elaborate? I use LVM on all my systems, and whenever I move to a new Fedora release I carry the old /home tree forward to the new installation. Wayne. And just how do you do that? The last time I tried to save /home, anaconda would not proceed until I checked the format it box. As I'm an alpha test site for amanda, the recovery was doable and was done, but what kind of twisted reasoning gives anaconda the right to demand I destroy my data? Well, nothing (unless it's on a partition that has to be formatted for an install, like /). And I've never had that problem. If /home is a separate LV, in Anaconda, select the PV with the /home LV inside it. You'll have to reset the mount points for all the LVs (an annoyance, to be sure, that I wish could be fixed), but you don't have to format /home (or /opt, or /usr/local, etc.) if it is a separate LV (or if it's on a separate partition). -- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Saturday 05 December 2009, Matthew Saltzman wrote: On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 12:33 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: On Saturday 05 December 2009, Wayne Feick wrote: On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 11:30 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: Folderol even. My objection to LVM is two fold. 1. It won't allow one to save things in the /home tree when doing an upgrade or re-install. I have an almost 10GB corpus of email, and several scripts that are needed for my daily operations that need to be preserved. LVM makes that impossible. Can you elaborate? I use LVM on all my systems, and whenever I move to a new Fedora release I carry the old /home tree forward to the new installation. Wayne. And just how do you do that? The last time I tried to save /home, anaconda would not proceed until I checked the format it box. As I'm an alpha test site for amanda, the recovery was doable and was done, but what kind of twisted reasoning gives anaconda the right to demand I destroy my data? Well, nothing (unless it's on a partition that has to be formatted for an install, like /). And I've never had that problem. If /home is a separate LV, in Anaconda, select the PV with the /home LV inside it. You'll have to reset the mount points for all the LVs (an annoyance, to be sure, that I wish could be fixed), but you don't have to format /home (or /opt, or /usr/local, etc.) if it is a separate LV (or if it's on a separate partition). I also tried that once, and convinced it I didn't want it formatted, about FC6 I think. It bought it I thought, till I found it had made a /home directory on /, the proceeded to write the new /home with its defaults. I took a bit of detective work to ascertain that my /home partition still existed, but wasn't ever used and was not in /etc/fstab as a separate entry. Dumb was NOT my comment when I found that. -- Cheers, Gene There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them. https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp Pilfering Treasury property is paticularly dangerous: big thieves are ruthless in punishing little thieves. -- Diogenes -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
Marc Wilson wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Tom H tomh0...@gmail.com wrote: I had understood the complexity to be the separate /boot not the use of lvm... Actually, the complexity is that Fedora for some insane reason still defaults to using LVM for everything *other* than /boot. This brings no benefit to most users. +2 -- Bill Davidsen david...@tmr.com We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from the machinations of the wicked. - from Slashdot -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
Matthew Saltzman wrote: On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 16:45 -0800, Marc Wilson wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Tom H tomh0...@gmail.com wrote: I had understood the complexity to be the separate /boot not the use of lvm... Actually, the complexity is that Fedora for some insane reason still defaults to using LVM for everything *other* than /boot. This brings no benefit to most users. Well, it means I can have separate filesystems for things that I don't want overwritten if I reinstall (/home, /usr/local, /opt, /var/www, etc.) and I can dynamically resize them if they get unbalanced. That's pretty useful. Someone else mentioned the limited number of physical and logical partitions. If you want separate partitions for those systems and for, say, separate system and user data on a dual-boot machine with Windows, and multiboot, and a diagnostics partition, those partitions can get used up pretty quickly. Have a big /boot and you can have many kernels available. During the 2.5 development cycles, between 2.4, 2.5, -ac, -mm, -aa, etc kernels I hit the limit of LILO to support more than 19 (from memory) kernels. Sane people don't have these problems. -- Bill Davidsen david...@tmr.com We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from the machinations of the wicked. - from Slashdot -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
Timothy Murphy gayle...@eircom.net writes: Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote: But the point is taken. There seem to be quite a few posts from folks that make their lives needlessly complex by mucking with the defaults and that ends up breaking something downstream. Are you saying that something is broken downstream if you don't use LVM? With respect, that is nonsense. I was just trying to say that the installation dialog makes it too easy and therefore encourages people to change the defaults when in fact they would be better off leaving things alone. Sure you can run without lvm. Sure you can put home on a different partition. Sure you can add other repositories during installation. The problem with doing all that is it takes you off the well-trodden path. For one, the default install is going to be the best tested configuration. For another, many newbies are encouraged to muck with the defaults without fully understanding the ramifications. -wolfgang -- Wolfgang S. Rupprecht If the airwaves belong to the public why does the public only get 3 non-overlapping WIFI channels? -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
Marko Vojinovic vvma...@gmail.com writes: And I was just about to ask what exactly is broken downstream... :-) I've been driving several Fedora versions on several machines for several years now with a custom-partitioned disks (simple setups, typically just swap, / and /home, no LVM or anything such), and nothing downstream seemed broken, ever. AFAICS, it is completely safe to not use LVM if you know you won't be resizing partitions afterwards. And life is simpler if the hard drive starts dying or something... ;-) Did you get selinux working or did you just turn it off in frustration becauce putting thing in non-default places broke the stock selinux policies? -wolfgang -- Wolfgang S. Rupprecht If the airwaves belong to the public why does the public only get 3 non-overlapping WIFI channels? -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 19:30 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: On Saturday 05 December 2009, Matthew Saltzman wrote: On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 12:33 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: On Saturday 05 December 2009, Wayne Feick wrote: On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 11:30 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: Folderol even. My objection to LVM is two fold. 1. It won't allow one to save things in the /home tree when doing an upgrade or re-install. I have an almost 10GB corpus of email, and several scripts that are needed for my daily operations that need to be preserved. LVM makes that impossible. Can you elaborate? I use LVM on all my systems, and whenever I move to a new Fedora release I carry the old /home tree forward to the new installation. Wayne. And just how do you do that? The last time I tried to save /home, anaconda would not proceed until I checked the format it box. As I'm an alpha test site for amanda, the recovery was doable and was done, but what kind of twisted reasoning gives anaconda the right to demand I destroy my data? Well, nothing (unless it's on a partition that has to be formatted for an install, like /). And I've never had that problem. If /home is a separate LV, in Anaconda, select the PV with the /home LV inside it. You'll have to reset the mount points for all the LVs (an annoyance, to be sure, that I wish could be fixed), but you don't have to format /home (or /opt, or /usr/local, etc.) if it is a separate LV (or if it's on a separate partition). I also tried that once, and convinced it I didn't want it formatted, about FC6 I think. It bought it I thought, till I found it had made a /home directory on /, the proceeded to write the new /home with its defaults. I took a bit of detective work to ascertain that my /home partition still existed, but wasn't ever used and was not in /etc/fstab as a separate entry. Dumb was NOT my comment when I found that. There's always a /home directory on the root filesystem. If you have a separate /home filesystem, the /home directory on the root filesystem is the mount point for the /home filesystem. If the instruction to mount your /home filesystem on the /home directory is not in /etc/fstab, it's because you didn't set the mount point for that filesystem (whether it's a partition or a LV) during installation. (Not that it's clear you need to do that during installation... If you know *nix filesystem structure, you know what's needed, but if not, it's not clear how you find out. I did a fair amount of reading when I first installed RHL 3.0.3!) -- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Saturday 05 December 2009, Matthew Saltzman wrote: On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 19:30 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: On Saturday 05 December 2009, Matthew Saltzman wrote: On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 12:33 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: On Saturday 05 December 2009, Wayne Feick wrote: On Sat, 2009-12-05 at 11:30 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: Folderol even. My objection to LVM is two fold. 1. It won't allow one to save things in the /home tree when doing an upgrade or re-install. I have an almost 10GB corpus of email, and several scripts that are needed for my daily operations that need to be preserved. LVM makes that impossible. Can you elaborate? I use LVM on all my systems, and whenever I move to a new Fedora release I carry the old /home tree forward to the new installation. Wayne. And just how do you do that? The last time I tried to save /home, anaconda would not proceed until I checked the format it box. As I'm an alpha test site for amanda, the recovery was doable and was done, but what kind of twisted reasoning gives anaconda the right to demand I destroy my data? Well, nothing (unless it's on a partition that has to be formatted for an install, like /). And I've never had that problem. If /home is a separate LV, in Anaconda, select the PV with the /home LV inside it. You'll have to reset the mount points for all the LVs (an annoyance, to be sure, that I wish could be fixed), but you don't have to format /home (or /opt, or /usr/local, etc.) if it is a separate LV (or if it's on a separate partition). I also tried that once, and convinced it I didn't want it formatted, about FC6 I think. It bought it I thought, till I found it had made a /home directory on /, the proceeded to write the new /home with its defaults. I took a bit of detective work to ascertain that my /home partition still existed, but wasn't ever used and was not in /etc/fstab as a separate entry. Dumb was NOT my comment when I found that. There's always a /home directory on the root filesystem. Of course. If you have a separate /home filesystem, the /home directory on the root filesystem is the mount point for the /home filesystem. If the instruction to mount your /home filesystem on the /home directory is not in /etc/fstab, it's because you didn't set the mount point for that filesystem (whether it's a partition or a LV) during installation. ISTR I did, but could be wrong, its quite a ways back up the log by now, so I'll plead oldtimers. Since I retired at 67 and I've been collecting SS for 8 years already, that isn't too much of a stretch. :) (Not that it's clear you need to do that during installation... If you know *nix filesystem structure, you know what's needed, but if not, it's not clear how you find out. I did a fair amount of reading when I first installed RHL 3.0.3!) Chuckle, that beats me, my first install was RH5.0. I need to install F12 here at some point, and it sure would be a hell of a lot easier if F10 had enough libraries installed to run gparted to prepare a drive the way _I_ want it and tell anaconda to go pound sand. For instance, why will it not accept a /boot partition specified for more than 199 megabytes? Why will it not accept a separate /root partition? Why will it not accept a separate /var partition? Or a separate /etc partition? When I lost my boot drive about a month ago, I used gparted to set a drive up the way my experience said it should be, then rsync'd everything to the new partitions, fixed the new drives fstab to use the labels I put on with gparted, moved the drive to the sata0 connector figuring I could boot the F10 dvd in the rescue mode and do a grub-install. But my F10 dvd had faded, so I had to get a friend to dl and burn me a fresh copy, which I then used to install grub. On the reboot I was back to a fully working F10, with one very noticeable difference, the machine is now 2-3x faster. And has remained so. All those separate partitions that the installer won't let you do? I'll let a df report testify. [r...@coyote .kde]# df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda3100790036 9356348 86313776 10% / /dev/sda1 404470177420206168 47% /boot /dev/sda5 30233896 8013188 20684896 28% /opt /dev/sda6 30233896 3822808 24875276 14% /home /dev/sda7 30233896 10849192 17848892 38% /root /dev/sda8 30233896 4082168 24615916 15% /var /dev/sda9 30233896193824 28504260 1% /tmp /dev/sda10 704924448 91152808 577963560 14% /usr -- Cheers, Gene There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) The NRA is offering FREE Associate memberships to anyone who wants them. https://www.nrahq.org/nrabonus/accept-membership.asp Don't suspect your friends -- turn them in!
Getting rid of /boot
According to it's website documentation grub has supported LVM for the past few minor releases. Is there any initiative to move /boot in LVM? Wondering, e. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Friday 04 December 2009 14:55, Eric Brunson wrote: According to it's website documentation grub has supported LVM for the past few minor releases. Is there any initiative to move /boot in LVM? Wondering, e. Sure would be a good thing, when /boot needs more space to complete some upgrade scenarios. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Eric Brunson brun...@brunson.com wrote: According to it's website documentation grub has supported LVM for the past few minor releases. Is there any initiative to move /boot in LVM? Can't imagine there's any reason for it, when all you have to do is structure the system reasonably in the first place. All the failed upgrade scenarios (why do people bother with preupgrade in the first place?) seem to involve people thinking they know better than the automated partitioning tools. Why add the complexity? -- Marc Wilson m...@cox.net -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Fri, 4 Dec 2009 15:56:06 -0800 Marc Wilson wrote: Why add the complexity? Because you can only have a max of 15 partitions on a disk without using LVM? At work we have a system with a gazillion or so different linux distros and had to set it up to dd copies of the /boot partition back onto /boot so we can boot the linux that goes with that /boot. If grub could boot from LVM, I wouldn't need the separate /boot shared among all the different linuxen. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
According to it's website documentation grub has supported LVM for the past few minor releases. Is there any initiative to move /boot in LVM? Can't imagine there's any reason for it, when all you have to do is structure the system reasonably in the first place. All the failed upgrade scenarios (why do people bother with preupgrade in the first place?) seem to involve people thinking they know better than the automated partitioning tools. Why add the complexity? grub legacy (grub 1) does not support lvm or ext4 so the F11 default was to have a separate ext3 /boot. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
Why add the complexity? Because you can only have a max of 15 partitions on a disk without using LVM? At work we have a system with a gazillion or so different linux distros and had to set it up to dd copies of the /boot partition back onto /boot so we can boot the linux that goes with that /boot. If grub could boot from LVM, I wouldn't need the separate /boot shared among all the different linuxen. I had understood the complexity to be the separate /boot not the use of lvm... grub 2 can boot from an lvm'd /boot. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Tom H tomh0...@gmail.com wrote: I had understood the complexity to be the separate /boot not the use of lvm... Actually, the complexity is that Fedora for some insane reason still defaults to using LVM for everything *other* than /boot. This brings no benefit to most users. -- Marc Wilson m...@cox.net -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Tom Horsley tom.hors...@att.net wrote: Because you can only have a max of 15 partitions on a disk without using LVM? The maximum number is 24, not 15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Extended_partition_and_logical_drives -- Marc Wilson m...@cox.net -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 19:45, Marc Wilson m...@cox.net wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Tom H tomh0...@gmail.com wrote: I had understood the complexity to be the separate /boot not the use of lvm... Actually, the complexity is that Fedora for some insane reason still defaults to using LVM for everything *other* than /boot. This brings no benefit to most users. With all due respect, the fact that one of us can't imagine the need for some technology doesn't say much, one way or another, about whether a general use case exists. In general, I find this attitude amusing, but you may have a point W.R.T. LVM. Some people have high skill and comfort levels working with LVM, and find all sorts of helpful uses for it. (Me, for instance.) But I work with more experienced UNIX/Linux admins who start cussing and moaning whenever they need to interact with it, and if you offer to help, the answer is often something along the lines of You can help by getting rid of LVM! I see similar sentiments on the mailing lists, too--some people really dislike it. I wonder whether it might be a solution in search of a problem. I can rattle off a list of LVM applications that have helped me, in the past (live backups w/ snapshotting, transparent expansion across new disks), but that never seems to convince the anti-LVM crowd. When we get into lunch-hour debates about the merits and flaws, the usual responses are along the lines of But you wouldn't *need* to do any of those things, if you'd designed your system correctly. I think you made a similar point, in your emails. But the flexibility is great, and I can think of dozens of situations where LVM's features saved me hours and days of time, or an inconvenient reboot, or just simplified some disk operation for me. I think the difference is that I know LVM *really* well, so I'm never frustrated by having to remember how the hell some obscure command option is supposed to work, or how to recover a VG with a missing PV when a RAID disk fails. But just to bring this back to the topic: From the day that Fedora re-unites /boot and / on a single LVM volume, I will henceforce script a YUM pre-upgrade hook that automatically takes a before snapshot of the entire system, for idiot-proof rollback if anything gets out of line. That will be a hell of a neat trick. -Ryan -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 16:45 -0800, Marc Wilson wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Tom H tomh0...@gmail.com wrote: I had understood the complexity to be the separate /boot not the use of lvm... Actually, the complexity is that Fedora for some insane reason still defaults to using LVM for everything *other* than /boot. This brings no benefit to most users. Well, it means I can have separate filesystems for things that I don't want overwritten if I reinstall (/home, /usr/local, /opt, /var/www, etc.) and I can dynamically resize them if they get unbalanced. That's pretty useful. Someone else mentioned the limited number of physical and logical partitions. If you want separate partitions for those systems and for, say, separate system and user data on a dual-boot machine with Windows, and multiboot, and a diagnostics partition, those partitions can get used up pretty quickly. (Pet peeve: I wish that /var/www and some other things in /var/lib that I don't want wiped out lived someplace else, like /srv. But I guess that battle's lost...) -- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On 12/04/2009 04:49 PM, Marc Wilson wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Tom Horsley tom.hors...@att.net wrote: Because you can only have a max of 15 partitions on a disk without using LVM? The maximum number is 24, not 15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Extended_partition_and_logical_drives On SATA, it is 15. On IDE it's 24? Not sure about PATA. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 20:13, Matthew Saltzman m...@clemson.edu wrote: Well, it means I can have separate filesystems for things that I don't want overwritten if I reinstall (/home, /usr/local, /opt, /var/www, etc.) and I can dynamically resize them if they get unbalanced. That's pretty useful. Out of curiousity, what filesystem do you use to get dynamic shrinking? -Ryan -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On 12/04/2009 07:49 PM, Marc Wilson wrote: On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Tom Horsley tom.hors...@att.net wrote: Because you can only have a max of 15 partitions on a disk without using LVM? The maximum number is 24, not 15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Extended_partition_and_logical_drives SCSI limits it to 15, and last I looked, Fedora was using SCSI drivers to talk to ATA disks these days -- Kevin J. Cummings kjch...@rcn.com cummi...@kjchome.homeip.net cummi...@kjc386.framingham.ma.us Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org) -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
Hi Tom. 2009/12/4 Tom H tomh0...@gmail.com: Why add the complexity? Because you can only have a max of 15 partitions on a disk without using LVM? At work we have a system with a gazillion or so different linux distros and had to set it up to dd copies of the /boot partition back onto /boot so we can boot the linux that goes with that /boot. If grub could boot from LVM, I wouldn't need the separate /boot shared among all the different linuxen. I had understood the complexity to be the separate /boot not the use of lvm... grub 2 can boot from an lvm'd /boot. Could you please point me to the documentation for this? I would really like to read up more and understand what limitations/advantages I might have as I have been waiting for this to be included since F10. -- Suvayu Open source is the future. It sets us free. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
On 12/04/2009 10:05 PM, suvayu ali wrote: Could you please point me to the documentation for this? I would really like to read up more and understand what limitations/advantages I might have as I have been waiting for this to be included since F10. http://grub.enbug.org/LVMandRAID?highlight=(lvm) -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
Re: Getting rid of /boot
Marc Wilson m...@cox.net writes: Can't imagine there's any reason for it, when all you have to do is structure the system reasonably in the first place. All the failed upgrade scenarios (why do people bother with preupgrade in the first place?) seem to involve people thinking they know better than the automated partitioning tools. The last f11-f12 preupgrade also failed with installation defaults from a clean (wipe the whole disk type) f11 install. But the point is taken. There seem to be quite a few posts from folks that make their lives needlessly complex by mucking with the defaults and that ends up breaking something downstream. -wolfgang -- Wolfgang S. Rupprecht If the airwaves belong to the public why does the public only get 3 non-overlapping WIFI channels? -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@redhat.com To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
