On Thu, Apr 09, 2009 at 10:00:40AM +0300, Tapani Tarvainen wrote: > On Wed, Apr 08, 2009 at 06:02:26PM -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh > (h...@debian.org) wrote: > > On Wed, 08 Apr 2009, Miles Fidelman wrote: > > I suggest that a small (1GB-4GB) partition for simple md-raid1 be used for > > / instead. That won't give you any headaches, including on disaster > > recovery scenarios.
If you're going to have separate partitions (e.g. /usr, /var, /home), then I would not call a 1-4 GB / "small". I have a 500 MB / of which only 117 MB is used. > I would respectfully disagree. There are significant advantages in > putting / in LVM, it is a well-supported, standard configuration, > and avoiding it only gives false sense of security: in a disaster > situation you need to know basics of mdadm and lvm anyway, if > you use them. > Yes, leaving / out of LVM does give you a more complete > environment to work with when system crashes in a way that LVM > (the volume group containing /) is inaccessible. > It doesn't help much though unless you also leave /usr out, > and I've lost count on how often I've enlarged /usr and > been grateful it was under LVM. What is in /usr that you'd need (ok, other than man pages)? > All the essential tools for managing software raid and lvm are, > however, available even without / - indeed they're in initrd, > and if you can't use them, you're out of luck anyway. You don't have whatever notes you've left yourself in /root > On the other hand, having / in LVM means: > * you can enlarge / when necessary; You should never have to enlarge a 500 MB / > * you can encrypt / if desired; Why would you need / encrypted (if swap, /tmp, /home, and parts of /var are encrypted)? > * you can use other RAID configurations besides RAID1 with /; True, but for 500 MB is that helpful? If you have more than 2 disks, just put a 500 MB partition on each and have more than 2 components to the raid1 array. > * you don't have to create separate volumes for each of > /usr, /var and /tmp (although you probably should anyway); > * it's the standard configuration, offered as automatic default > installation option, and many people are using it so finding > someone to help when needed shouldn't be hard. I've never used the automatic default; It always wastes resources on my boxes. > As for the rest of your points, well, both software raid > and lvm do increase complexity and require learning some > new tricks, but they're well worth the trouble if you > manage any system more complex than a simple workstation, > IMHO. Figure out what all documentation, man pages (in text format), notes, etc that you would want and put them in /root/doc. Any scripts that you find helpful for rebuilding arrays you could put in /root/bin. Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org