Ted Leung on the air : LVM

The server that we store our digital photos on ran out of space, so I had to slap another hard drive into the machine. While I was at it, I turned on Logical Volume Manger (LVM) support, so that this will be slightly less painful the next time this happens. I had already compiled LVM support into the kernel (2.6.5), so all I needed to do was install Debian's lvm2 package and follow the directions in the LVM-HOWTO. It turned out to be much less painful than I anticipated.

When I suggested using LVM on a new server last night I was boo'ed down and told that all the cool kids are using EVMS these days.
Posted by kellan at Wed Aug 4 10:12:04 2004

I'll keep an eye on EVMS, but I'm not enthused about stuff that hasn't made it into the mainline kernel, and the page says that you need patches.

I've got the same problem with User Mode Linux, although there's an effort to get the version in the kernel working again.
Posted by Ted Leung at Wed Aug 4 23:06:33 2004

Hi, I have a question about using lvm2 on Debian and was hoping you could help me. I installed Debian 3.1 with kernel version 2.6.8, then used apt to install lvm2. What I'm trying to do is pool a couple of different hard drives together for more storage and mount it under /var. However, I have not been able to get Debian to detect and load the lvm by itself. In other words, after logging in, I have to stop all services accessing /var, run 'vgscan' to detect the lvm, then run 'vgchange -a y' to activate it, mount it to /var, then restart all services. As I'm sure you can imagine, this is a very tedious process because I reboot a couple of times daily as I'm still learning and playing with Linux (I'm fairly new to Linux, been using it less than 6 months). In order to try and get debian to mount it properly, I've experimented with placing the above commands into different files around my install. I've edited my fstab file to mount the lvm in the appropriate location and tried placing them at the top of bootmisc.sh as well as mountall.sh, both with fairly dire consequences -> the system can't boot. I can recover easily enough with my Knoppix cd, but this problem has almost beaten me into submission. I don't want to have to go back to Windows. I want it to just mount the logical volumes and then start the services that access them. Do you have any ideas? Thanks.
Posted by Matthew Picklesimer at Tue Nov 29 01:58:38 2005

Matthew,

This sounds like a problem with the kernel to me. You shouldn't have to do what you are doing to detect lvm.
Posted by Ted Leung at Tue Nov 29 23:06:29 2005