Peter Tenenbaum: > > Mark -- I've decided against using LVM because (a) it adds another level of > complication to the overall recovery / RAID-ification procedure, which at my > low level of expertise I really do not need, and (b) it's not clear to me > that LVM offers that much benefit for a relatively simple home system with > more hard drive capacity than I really need. Maybe on my next system...
I understand your argument about added complexity, but especially if you
don't know yet how you will use your disk's capacity, LVM is your
friend.
At work today, I prepared a virtual machine for a specific task. When I
realized that I had underestimated one of the filesystem's sizes, I just
needed to follow these steps:
- Add another virtual disk to the system
- Run pvcreate to prepare the disk for LVM
- Run vgextend to add the new space to the appropriate volume group
- Run lvextend to allocate the new space to the volume that was too
small
- Run resize2fs to grow the filesystem
This was a matter of less than ten minutes (including lookup of the
exact syntax of the LVM commands) and it didn't involve any reboots or
even umounts.
In your case, it gets even easier. Initially, you just need to prepare
one partition for LVM and setup logical volumes for your filesystems
using the size you are sure they will need. If, at one point, you
realize you need more space, you just need to run two commands: lvextend
and resize2fs (assuming you are using ext[234]).
When you have free space in a volume group, you get another benefit as
well: you can snapshot your filesystems for backup runs or before
actions that you are afraid might damage things.
I consider myself to be a quite proficent linux user (almost ten years
of Debian experience), but didn't start using LVM until about a year
ago. I deeply regret that.
J.
--
When standing at the top of beachy head I find the rocks below very
attractive.
[Agree] [Disagree]
<http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html>
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