On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 05:35:30AM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> 
>   first question -- is there any sane reason not to use LVM these
> days?  the manual opens (predictably) with showing the student how to
> allocate fixed partitions during the install, and leaves LVM setup for
> later in the week as an "advanced" topic.  i see it the other way
> around -- LVM should be the norm nowadays.
>


No reason to use LVM. The traditional "md" software raid is much simpler
and easier to manage (only one tool to learn - mdadm, compared
to the 100 lvm management programs). Historically, LVM is a knock-off
of XLV which was the companion partitionning tool to SGI's XFS filesystem.


>   thoughts?  i'll always allocate /boot as a regular partition but
> unless there are compelling reasons not to, i always recommend LVM as
> the standard.


Your /boot partition has to be mirrored across both of your system disks.
If it's only on one disk and it fails, you have an unbootable machine,
regardless of what tool you used (lvm or md).

With "md" it is very simple, /dev/md0 is the system partition mirrored
across /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1, there is no need for separate /boot
partition, GRUB happily installs on both /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, and
your machine happily boots if either disk explodes.

To do the same with LVM, you probably have to read a book and take
an advanced sysadmin class; and forget about getting it to actually
work without the help of this mailing list.


-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada