Do all these people you speak of just affect / ?   I don't understand the
argument..   Yeah - mistakes get made.  The really important data is
probably not under the / LVM at all... it's in those other filesystems that
I guess people don't affect?  ;-)

The only argument I'm really hearing is that recovery is harder..  and well,
maybe.   I've had clobbered non-LVM / disks before...   I brought up a
recovery system to fix what I could.   That's what I did for an LVM / as
well..  and since we have hundreds of these buggers they are all set up
exactly the same way from an OS point of view and I didn't need the config
info to know where things are or which disks might be the issue.  (That's
why conventions like 100-1FF for Linux OS volumes are nice -- you always
know which disks make up an LVM)

Anyway - I still say humbug.  There's nothing about a non-LVM /  that will
protect you from people...

Scott

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Mark Post <[email protected]> wrote:

> >>> On 11/26/2009 at 12:53 PM, Scott Rohling <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > I know we've had this discussion before.. but..  I fail to understand why
> > everyone seems to find LVM reliable for everything BUT /.   I'm promised
> it
> > will certainly fail - it's just a matter of time.  Why??   Why does the
> > reliability of LVM suddenly break down when you talk about a particular
> > filesystem?   I find it illogical.
>
> It's not illogical at all.  People are people and they make mistakes.  When
> all your configuration information is locked away in an inaccessible LV, it
> makes recovery very much harder than it would be otherwise.  It's not that
> LVM itself is particularly unreliable (although like any software it has
> it's bugs), it's the people involved.  And I'm not just talking about the
> system administrator.  There's also the storage admin, the fabric admin, the
> storage CE, the person that accidentally tweaked the wrong fiber connector
> in the switch, you name it.  When you've supported nearly a thousand
> physical servers, these lessons get burned into your memory.
>
> > The few times I've experienced issues with / being an LVM are the very
> same
> > issues I have with any other filesystem under an LVM .. missing disks,
> > changed uuids, etc.
>
> Exactly.  But when you went to fix the problem, was /etc/ available?
>  Probably.
>
> > I'm not especially advocating using LVM for / - although I find it has
> some
> > advantages.
>
> Given the file system layout I use, I see no advantages at all, only
> disadvantages.
>
> > I'm just asking why it's reliability is so much in question.
>
> It's not in question, particularly.
>
> > What is there about / that makes LVM 'sure to fail'?   I say humbug to
> > that..
>
> See above.  It's the people involved.  (And sometimes just Murphy/Cosmic
> radiation/whatever.)
>
>
> Mark Post
>
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