Re: Moving LVM volume?
On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 3:13 AM, Frank Miles <fpm@u.washington.edu> wrote:
> [...]
>
> Thanks to everyone (Joe,Joel,Pascal,Tapani,Mark,...) for your interesting
> replies. In response to your answers and questions:
>
> I've been using the new-drive-system (jessie) for a bit over a week.
> With the stock kernel it's mostly functional though 'systemctl status'
> is whining about being 'degraded'. I probably wouldn't have discovered
> that if my custom-kernel efforts* weren't failing in mysterious ways.
> I was hoping that cleaning up the boot process would resolve the deeper
> mysteries without having to think or work too hard.
>
> /usr is currently taking ~11G. So there's not enough space to simply
> merge the primary partitions and have / and /usr live on that.
Unless you can arrange to give the whole thing around 30G or more, yeah.
> I do too
> many different kinds of things to limit it - I expect it to grow, possibly
> double in the next couple of years (and at that point this system will
> probably get replaced anyway. the new disk is mainly to keep this old
> system doddering along for a bit longer)
Similar situation here.
> My proximal backup is the original disk, and I have tried to keep that
> unaltered in developing the new system. I haven't (yet) backed-up to
> my external backup drive - that's a bit of a pain to setup. I've had
> drives fail on me, don't want to use that as /usr. I certainly wouldn't
> trust a USB drive as /usr.
I'd suggest booting your original install to do the backup the last
week's changes to your personal data now. You need the freedom to
move. (Well, I've found it easier to think if I give myself room to do
so.)
> I guess I'm going to have to reinstall jessie from scratch. This will
> take time as my network link is a slow DSL :(
1 MBps here. New installs used to take me two or three days because
I'd take to many defaults.
I've found I've gone to doing minimal installs and adding the bits I
need a little at a time. Then I can have the box I'm working on back
on the net within a few hours. Start after breakfast, be reading my
mail a little after lunch.
> The alternatives don't
> sound appealing.
Glad you understood that. It can be fun, I've done it. Once. Don't
want to do it on my own dime again.
There can be reasons to do such things on production servers, but even
then, you are basically only going to do it to salvage data, never the
OS.
> I have a lot of customization of my machines - hey,
> if I just wanted to do what everyone else did I could run Windows.
:-)
> So thanks again for your replies - I am at least satisfied that I've made
> a reasonable effort to 'fix' the problems. I will have to think some
> more about LVM - it seems like a great idea, but possibly not the best
> option for my particular circumstances.
Actually, you basically need this kind of experience to know when and
how to use LVM, so you might want to go ahead and use it. Just give
yourself more flexibility in the DOS basic partition layout, as well.
For instance, I have three disks (PATA - old hardware, yes.) I started
with an 80G and 160G disk. The 80G has one base partition with grub.
grub boots a rescue OS in the same partition and chains to openbsd in
another base partition on that drive. There are currently two swap
partitions on that drive, one in a base partition and another in an
extended partition. I needed swap in a base partition some years ago
when I was trying out opensolaris or something. I also have an
extended VFAT partition there.
The 160G partition has housed two OSses in the past, Fedora, OpenSUSE,
net/free/openbsd. For the past two years it had squeeze, then wheezy
as my primary workstation OS. It had the root partition in a primary
partition, booted directly from the grub in the 80G drive (which used
to mean having to update the rescue OS to keep grub tracking the
kernel on the 160G drive), one base partition for /home, and one base
partition for LVM. I used the swap partitions on the 80G drive, but I
also had a third swap partition inside the LVM physical volume. (Swap
on a separate drive can help a bit when the system starts thrashing.)
Third drive for backup, but I find now that I wish I'd used plain
ext2. openbsd doesn't read ext3 and above, at least, not without some
special help. That's what the rescue OS is for, however, so it's just
a matter of freeing up some space to move my most recent /home to.
Something I've wanted to try, just for fun, /boot in one base
partition, the rest of the drive as an LVM physical volume. Someday,
maybe, when I come back to using debian again down the road.
--
Joel Rees
Be careful when you look at conspiracy.
Look first in your own heart,
and ask yourself if you are not your own worst enemy.
Arm yourself with knowledge of yourself, as well.
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