Re: to lvm or not to lvm?

[Bob <spam@homeurl.co.uk>]

Andrew Sackville-West wrote:

8< snip lots of automatically growing partitions using LVM stuff

> Why are you after this complexity of automatically growing partitions?
> disk space is cheap. recovering from problematic fs resizes is NOT. I
> understand the idea of tuning your partition sizes so that you can
> have the optimal size and this is very doable with LVM, but if you've
> got portions of your directory tree that might grow really big, then
> just give them the space and be done with it. It you later determine
> that you don't need it all, you can adjust then with LVM with relative
> ease. 
>   

I'm trying to think of a way an admin coming for the Windows world, or 
from a home server world, where they've had the convenience of not 
having to think about these things and you've either got harddrive space 
or you don't, can have a that convenience while retaining the extra 
security of having lots of partitions with different functions that 
can't steal space from each other.  I don't know how common it is for a 
live fs resize to go south, if it's a statistically significant 
percentage then obviously it wouldn't be worth the risk, if not I still 
think it's a good idea.

> And if your logs are getting so big, then you need to look into other
> solutions: do you really need all the stuff you are logging; are you
> using logrotate; is there some problem that is spewing out errors into
> your logs etc etc etc.
>   

It's not a problem for me at the moment, I'm just mulling the ideas 
round, if it's a service that might be useful I might try and write it.

> that said, you may of course do whatever you like to your system. And
> the idea sounds cool on the face of it. I just think you're asking for
> trouble and unneeded complexity. 
>   

I agree simplicity=good complexity=bad, but sometimes it's worth adding 
two measures of complexity to an automated system in order to remove one 
from user, or in this case admin, space, particularly if you can do it 
in a relatively easy to understand way, such as with well documented 
shell scripts, getting called by a disk space monitoring daemon.

Anyway, I've got so many projects on at the moment I probably won't have 
time to do anything about it, it's fun to kick the ideas round though.

--
Garrr, do your bit for global warming, become a pirate, you can "borrow" my copy of Windows 95 if you want.