Morning?

[swestrup]

Slept in yet again. Doesn't seem to be much point in trying to sort my hours around until AFTER the new years party. After that I'll see what I can do to make sure I start waking up in the morning. I'm starting to miss seeing any sun.

On the Linux adventure front, things are moving apace, although my ignorance in certain areas is definitely showing. Such as, what is LVM supposed to be good for? The reason I ask is that I put my root and /var partitions on LVM volumes in the hopes that rearranging how much space was dedicated to each should be easy. Instead I find that its just added an extra layer of work, with no particular benefit.

I should perhaps explain. I have decided to take a 40 GB NTFS partition that I have been using as my second windows partition and make it virtual. This would seem to involve the following steps:

1. Delete the 40 GB partition.
2. Use GParted to move the 40GB of unallocated space right after the LVM partition.
3. Expand the LVM partition to encompass the 40 GB space.
   
4. Expand the LVM physical volume to fill the partition.
5. Expand the LVM logical partition for /var to take the new free space.
6. resize the filesystem on /var
7. Tell VirtualBox to create a 40GB virtual filesystem on /var
8. Associate the new virtual filesystem with my Windows instance, replacing the raw partition it was using.
   

Now, forgive me if I'm wrong, but if I hadn't used LVM at all, the steps would have been just:

1. Delete the 40 GB partition.
2. Use GParted to move the 40GB of unallocated space right after the LVM partition.
3. Expand the /var partition to use the extra space.
4. resize the filesystem on /var
5. Tell VirtualBox to create a 40GB virtual filesystem on /var
6. Associate the new virtual filesystem with my Windows instance, replacing the raw partition it was using.

What's more, since GParted understands XFS file systems (which is what I have on /var) then all of the above could have been accomplished from a single application, without rebooting. Because GParted does NOT understand LVM and the LVM tools seem pretty primitive, it would seem that to accomplish #4 in the first list, I have to edit the partition table on a non-running system. So now I am downloading a live debian image which I will use to resize my LVM partition

Oh, and I'm trying to figure out how you tell KDE (or Gnome, for that matter) that you don't want to use the default file manager, but one of the other ones provided with your distro. It turns out that Konqueror (the KDE default) has issues when working on NTFS volumes. Sufficiently so that it keeps crashing in the middle of operations and making me do file system checks. I'm told that Thunar has no such issues and I would like to try it out instead.

Comments

[sps.livejournal.com]

I think the idea of LVM is that if your storage is already managed by LVM then you can screw around with your partitions to your heart's content, without worrying too much about physical layout and the 'moving' steps. The pain seems to be due to the import, not the virtualisation.

VBox can map physical partitions directly, did you know? But you have to set that up from the command line.

[swestrup]

> VBox can map physical partitions directly, did you know?

Yes, that's how that 40 GB partition was originally handled, but you have to dismount the partitions in order to take a snapshot, and seeing as how my "My Documents" folder is on that partition, I decided to take it virtual rather than have it raw. That way there's far less of a chance of an 'oops'.

As for the LVM thing, my original plan was to just reformat the extra 40GB as a PV, add it to the pool and extend across it. That would have been simpler, and wouldn't have involved a reboot. The problem is, the LVM documents recommend against that because you apparently take a major performance hit if LVM owns more than one partition on any given disk.