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Now testing: LVM2

It’s been a while since last time I used the iBook to write a blog entry; I’m doing it now because the main system, the AMD64 box (‘enterprise’) is currently moving stuff out the two SATA drives I have to the smaller PATA drive, so that I can relayout it using LVM2.
Why this? Well, I wanted to try something new, and I was getting tired of the way I had to organize stuff on disk, so I preferred this way; I’m going to make in use only part of the two SATA disks and about nothing of the PATA one, with a more decent organization (say, instead of having /scratch, /media/sda8 and /media/sdb8, with music stuff and videos and whatever else put there randomly, I can have a /media/music ext3 formatted with the music, a /media/videos xfs formatted with videos and so on).

LVM2 was something I never actually thought about before, and johm said so wonderful things about it that I needed to try. Today I worked on the paid job and so I’ll do tomorrow (whenever I’ll wake up), but this night I’m not going to sleep calmly anyway. My personal life sucks greatly lately, also if it’s partially usual, I’m feeling tired of it.
The time I’m spending lately looking for learning japanese is a clear sign that I have way too much time also if I’m working for the paid job and for Gentoo. Being multitasking-able while waiting in the delays between builds it’s not a good thing when you need to employ that time to avoid thinking of bad things.

Actually, the emerge -e world following the -Bdirect tests is not yet complete, I’m missing something like 70 packages, but they can wait for when the move will be complete.
I’m actually wondering how comes that my system is more or less stable working, although I’m using ~arch, with many p.masked packages, GCC 4 and 4.1, unsupported LDFLAGS… and the worse problem I’ve seen lately is xorg-server’s breakage caused by -Bdirect that can worked around until a proper fix is inplace. Probably sheer luck, or simply I know what to look for when something breaks πŸ˜›
[Actually, it’s not stable now, I just found out that the 80GB drive has bad sectors in it, sigh!]

So now I’m bothering rocket to help me finishing this up as it’s going to be a bit more difficult… hope to get alright after πŸ˜›

Update: thanks to rocket I’m currently starting the actual work… I spent the whole night moving stuff in a single partition and then rebuilding kernel because I added support for software raid1, so I’m putting my /home in a 15GB mirrored partition, safety rocks πŸ˜› Now I “just” have to create partitions for /usr, /var and so on, and move around the stuff instead of having it on the big 100GB partition, so that I can delete it and make it some more partition for lvm.

I promised a friend of mine that my box will be up tomorrow as he has to get one of his files I had backupped here (don’t ask me why or what πŸ˜‰ ) and I want to respect that promise… this means I have basically no time to sleep.. but that’s ok… I don’t feel like sleeping now.

Update 2: okay finally it’s all configured, I had a bit of problem because my overlaid lvm2 package was broken. Fixed that, I fought to get /dev/md0 working… at the end on dsd_’s suggestion, I tried setting the partitions to Linux raid autodetect, still not working, until I moved DM stuff in-kernel instead of modular, then I had nothing to do, not even mdadm, and the kernel recognised /dev/md0 by itself. And now I’m going to work (I slept at 9am today!)

Comments 1
  1. LVM is great… I once moved a complete server to a new harddisk with interruption only for a reboot after / was moved. Being able to move a writable mounted filesystem to a different drive is just nice – I guess you will ask yourself how you could ever live with a system without LVM πŸ˜‰

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