Re: Partition, LVM, and RAID management utility
On Wed, Aug 10, 2005 at 05:06:41PM -0700, Shaun Jackman wrote:
[...]
> I suggest one of two things, or if there's time both! 1. Port partman
> from debian-installer to make it a full fledged utility. 2. Port
> whatever tool Red Hat uses [2] for this same task and package it for
> Debian. I haven't used the latter, so the former would be my
> preference. Can someone more familiar with partman and
> debian-installer give an indication of how much work this would be?
[...]
In my recent experience, after installing sarge (etch, sid), it is
pretty trivial to convert the system to all evms-native volume
management. You just need to make a few small additions to the
mkinitrd config so that the dm lkm and evms hooks get loaded before
the root partition is mounted, then corresponding adjustments in
your grub config and fstab file. The only real hassle is leaving
yourself room to cpio -p a second root lvm or using evms from a
ramdisk/live cd to convert your legacy root volume to an evms-native
one. The evms debs include great command-line, ncurses-based and gtk
frontends for partition/raid/volume/snapshot/filesystem management,
so it would probably give you what you're looking for, and all using
packages from main without needing to recompile a thing.
At work and at home I have a number of servers running Debian on all
evms-native volumes (/boot is on a physical disk segment and all
other non-tempfs/special filesystems/swap are lvm2). Leave some
available space in the volume group and you can schedule cron jobs
to fork/reap snapshots of your critical filesystems for an easy way
of retrieving old copies of files without resorting to pulling out
backup tapes.
I looked at throwing together some d-i patches to get the unusable
(last I checked) evms udeb going again, but haven't had time with
other projects I've got going. Still, doesn't seem like it would be
very involved to add would cut out/automate a lot of the more
labor-intensive steps in creating a similar setup at install time.
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