Re: to lvm or not to lvm?
On Fri, Apr 20, 2007 at 07:11:29PM -0500, Default User wrote:
>
> intended use: standard home system, single user, not mission critical
> (except that to everyone, their own data is always "mission critical").
> nothing exotic or fancy.
>
> do really need lvm? if i have to ask, then the answer is, "probably
> not". my concern was that a partition that seems spacious originally,
> can over time become cramped, while another loafs with unused space. and
> no one can precisely predict future needs. further, i plan to switch to
> testing after the chaos dies down, and want to run that at least until
> lenny becomes the next stable. so i am trying to think long term. and
> re-installing every 6 months would really get old fast.
>
> i could just have one / partiton (plus a swap partition). That's simple,
> flexible, and low maintenance. no worrying about data outgrowing
> partition sizes. but the OpenBSD FAQ makes a compelling case for
> multiple partitions, at least separate /, /tmp, /var, /usr, and /home
> (as well as an ENCRYPTED swap partition). and that is one of the default
> partitioning choices in the Debian installer.
>
> note: I am not trying to start an OS flame war. I just mention it for
> what it's worth.
>
> a fresh install is a rare opportunity to do things right, so I try not
> to squander it.
Agreed.
I _always_ use separate partitions unless I'm trying to install to a 171
MB drive (just did that, needed NetBSD). There are _many_ compelling
reasons to have separate partitions for separate major chunks of the
file system. One is when drive space gets tight, you can farm it off to
a new disk.
LVM makes this so much easier. Its also stable. So why not?
<plug-for-raid>
Drives are cheap. You may like to research putting your
system (/, /boot, /usr, /var, swap [with /tmp on tmpfs]) on raid1 with
everything but /boot on LVM over top of the raid array. If you're
really thinking long-term, then you have to plan for a drive failure.
</plug-for-raid>
No matter what you do, you'll need good backups: at least /etc, /boot,
/home, dpkg --get-selections, aptitude search '~i!~M', fdisk -lu and
sfdisk -d for each drive, onto media that you can read from a rescue
system with all this plus an install CD stored off-site.
For completeness, for partition sizes, I recommend: / 512 MB, /boot 65
MB, /usr 4 GB, /var 4 GB (I store backups in /var/local), /tmp 256 MB
(on tmpfs), with /home whatever. I have home on a separate VG (on raw
disks) from the system VG (on raid1). You could consider putting
/var/tmp on a non-raid VG and making its LV striped for speed.
If you don't mind a boot-up passphrase, then encrypt /home and /var/tmp
(along with swap with /tmp on tmpfs). Konquorer for example puts its
cache via a symlink in your home directory to /var/tmp and there's no
way to change that behaviour. So even if your /home is encrypted,
Konquorer's cache is not.
As always, YMMV and there are as many ways to set this up as there are
people on this list.
Good luck,
Doug.
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