[wellylug] Manual Partitioning using LVM

[David Harrison]

On 26/10/2006, at 3:39 PM, Rob Collins wrote:

> sorry, slip of hand, /boot should have been written simply "/".   
> Thanks for the advice, leaving 10mb spare sounds like sound tip,  
> wasn't aware of ext3 shrink problem.  Does this also mean that I  
> will have problems resizing up and down my ext3 LV's?  If that's  
> the case, this defeats the whole reason I'm trying to use LVM.

This is a good Red Hat article on resizing LVM with ext3:
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_96_4842.shtm

Resizing LVM upwards is not too much of an issue but I have had  
random issues when shrinking that have either been traced back to LVM  
itself or a corruption in the overlaid filesystem. I've found  
shrinking is not really an issue because in reality it's very rare  
that you are going to shrink a filesystem if you start out small and  
grow it to suit your needs.

I find it generally better to work with LVM on a functional basis,  
for example 'server-files', 'video', 'user-data' rather than thinking  
in terms of /usr or /home.
For example the 'user-data' volume would mount onto /home and 'video'  
volume on /home/video.
Once you think of it like that you'll may find determining the  
'correct' size of your volumes a lot easier.

As per your last email the /var directory is used for logging,  
caching and in the case of Debian/Ubuntu Web and ftp storage.
It's generally the most active part of your filesystem and over time  
will grow to become quite large.

Don't worry too much about sorting your volumes/mount points out all  
at once during the install process, it is relatively straightforward  
to move your /var data to LVM later on if you find it maybe worthwhile.

By the way if you are new to LVM then it maybe worthwhile giving Suse  
a try. It provides support for LVM during the installation process  
and Yast has an excellent GUI tool for managing LVM volumes post  
install. Ubuntu is getting much better but its still not quite at the  
same level as Suse when it comes to LVM.


David




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