Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Wed, 25 Oct 2006, Andy Green wrote:
Robert P. J. Day wrote:
by the way, is there any reason *not* to encourage folks to use LVM
rather than simple primary/extended/logical partitions?
If the LVM header area in front of the actual filesystem gets
damaged, it ain't pretty.
well, yes, there's that, but is the extra flexibility that comes with
logical volumes worth the extra (albeit slight) risk? i have folks
ask me my opinion occasionally (yeah, that's frightening), and i
typically suggest that it's worth it to use LVM. but i'm always
willing to listen to dissenting arguments.
I also advised folks to use LVM because of the flexibility, and in some
cases (eg, we had some boxes with 12 SATA drive slots that were not
initially fully popuplated but would be filled over time) I'd still say
the same as you propose, especially as they were raided underneath in
this case.
But on a box like this laptop, what does LVM being on by default really
get you? I don't use separate partitions for /home and such, for the
single user laptop situation it's not beneficial. So short of going
nuts and taping a USB drive on top of the laptop and superglueing its
lead in, for me at least LVM only enables the possibility of downsides
while giving nothing good.
I did get an LVM header area damaged a few months ago on another machine
(turned out the HDD was dying) that made it more difficult than it
should have been to recover the filesystem behind it: after that I
stopped being an automatic LVM fan.
On the original question what I normally do is have everything on a
single /. Usually what can fill up /home and /var is typically not done
under root rights, and the default 5% reservation for root only on
ext2/3 means you can then still ssh in as root to fix problems in most
of the circumstances that you were trying to avoid with fixed sized
separate partitions. But none of the choices are inherently dumb and it
depends on the exact usage scenario.
-Andy
