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[LUG] LVM2 and Software Raid (And also Gentoo)



Ok for the last few days I've been taking the plunge and installing Gentoo
Linux over my Redhat 7.3 installation on my P4 dev box.  For those who dont
know Gentoo, I consider it like a Linux from scratch distro, without the
pain.  Ultimately I shall be upgrading my 7.3 P233 box to Gentoo as well.

Comments so far on Gentoo.

The good points
1. The portage package manager is very good, I told it on Sunday night to
"emerge php", and it went away and compiled all the dependencies like
libxml.  No RPM dependency hell here. (Yet)
2. You can choose what you want.  I wanted a 2.6 kernel, and sure enough I
have a 2.6 kernel installed.
3. Once going, the box seems pretty dam fast and compact.

The not so good points
1. Defiantly not for newbie Linux users.
2. If you go for compile everything option, this takes a while.  Not ideal
if you are setting up a box in a hurry or for an old box. (However there are
binaries available)
3. A Broadband connection is needed (Unless you go for the installation CD's
method, which is possible)
4. Make sure you have a good supply of coffee and DVD's - there will be some
long waits between parts. :)

Anyway, after all the work (A good day's work at least) I'm happy.
Currently the dev box's task for the day is to compile Gnome from source. :)

Now to my question, which is not a Gentoo specific question.  

During the installation and reading of the docs I came across LVM2, and went
"Ohh whats that?"  I read up on it, and decided to try LVM2 on my dev box.
Well after the problems (Such as installing the wrong LVM user tools) I got
it going.  I kept my partitions small and extended them when needed.

It's not a perfect solution, as I still had to drop down to the single user
run level to resize and remount the ext2/3 partitions.  If you use reiserfs,
the partitions can be resized without remounting. More on LVM
http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/LVM-HOWTO/

Anyway, I was saying earlier I intend to upgrade the P233 server box, my
intention is to have pair of new hard discs and mirror them using software
raid.  But I can't see how I can use LVM2 and Software raid together?  Is it
possible?

As the problem I see is you have to set the raid partitions to type FD (Raid
auto detect) and LVM partitions to type 8e (Linux LVM), now you can't have
the partitions with two different types!

Cheers,

Pete Hatton
--
pete@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

P.S. Sorry if this doesn't come in plain text, but no prizes for guessing
the mail client I'm stuck with using...

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