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Home > Archive > Debian Developers > August 2005 > Partition, LVM, and RAID management utility
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Partition, LVM, and RAID management utility
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| Shaun Jackman 2005-08-10, 8:49 pm |
| For for the first time since potato, I reinstalled Debian from scratch
on my main box. Hoorah for dist-upgrade! One experience I took away
from the installation is how impressed I was with partman, the
debian-installer partition management tool. This was my first time
using SATA, LVM, and RAID -- I figured I'd play with all the new
buzzwords while I had the opportunity -- and partman made it all quite
simple!
Once I had my system up and running, I decided to go back and tweak a
couple things in the partitioning / LVM / RAID scheme. After looking
for a bit, I didn't find a utility [1] quite as good as partman for
this task, so I fell back to the command line utilities fdisk, lvm,
and mdadm. My sense of it is that there isn't a tool packaged in
Debian to fill this need -- although feel free to give suggestions at
this point.
I suggest one of two things, or if there's time both! 1. Port partman
from debian-installer to make it a full fledged utility. 2. Port
whatever tool Red Hat uses [2] for this same task and package it for
Debian. I haven't used the latter, so the former would be my
preference. Can someone more familiar with partman and
debian-installer give an indication of how much work this would be?
Cheers!
Shaun
[1] qtparted is a nice tool, but doesn't handle LVM or RAID yet as far
as I know. webmin-lvm is a capable looking tool though.
[2] I think this tool might be called DiskDruid, but I'm quite out of
touch with Red Hat state-of-the-art.
| |
| Karl Chen 2005-08-11, 3:13 am |
| >>>>> On 2005-08-10 17:06 PDT, Shaun Jackman writes:
Shaun> My sense of it is that there isn't a tool packaged in
Shaun> Debian to fill this need -- although feel free to give
Shaun> suggestions at this point.
Evms is the best all-in-one tool for disk management I've found.
However, Debian-Installer doesn't support it, and you need to
patch the kernel to be able to use evms with non-evms partitions
on the same disk. I don't think initrd-tools supports it either,
so using evms for the root partition is also tricky. If the
default kernel image included the bd-claim patch, things would be
a lot easier.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=304507
--
Karl 2005-08-10 18:49
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| The Fungi 2005-08-11, 3:13 am |
| On Wed, Aug 10, 2005 at 05:06:41PM -0700, Shaun Jackman wrote:
[...]
> I suggest one of two things, or if there's time both! 1. Port partman
> from debian-installer to make it a full fledged utility. 2. Port
> whatever tool Red Hat uses [2] for this same task and package it for
> Debian. I haven't used the latter, so the former would be my
> preference. Can someone more familiar with partman and
> debian-installer give an indication of how much work this would be?
[...]
In my recent experience, after installing sarge (etch, sid), it is
pretty trivial to convert the system to all evms-native volume
management. You just need to make a few small additions to the
mkinitrd config so that the dm lkm and evms hooks get loaded before
the root partition is mounted, then corresponding adjustments in
your grub config and fstab file. The only real hassle is leaving
yourself room to cpio -p a second root lvm or using evms from a
ramdisk/live cd to convert your legacy root volume to an evms-native
one. The evms debs include great command-line, ncurses-based and gtk
frontends for partition/raid/volume/snapshot/filesystem management,
so it would probably give you what you're looking for, and all using
packages from main without needing to recompile a thing.
At work and at home I have a number of servers running Debian on all
evms-native volumes (/boot is on a physical disk segment and all
other non-tempfs/special filesystems/swap are lvm2). Leave some
available space in the volume group and you can schedule cron jobs
to fork/reap snapshots of your critical filesystems for an easy way
of retrieving old copies of files without resorting to pulling out
backup tapes.
I looked at throwing together some d-i patches to get the unusable
(last I checked) evms udeb going again, but haven't had time with
other projects I've got going. Still, doesn't seem like it would be
very involved to add would cut out/automate a lot of the more
labor-intensive steps in creating a similar setup at install time.
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| Goswin von Brederlow 2005-08-11, 5:55 pm |
| Shaun Jackman <sjackman@gmail.com> writes:
> For for the first time since potato, I reinstalled Debian from scratch
> on my main box. Hoorah for dist-upgrade! One experience I took away
> from the installation is how impressed I was with partman, the
> debian-installer partition management tool. This was my first time
> using SATA, LVM, and RAID -- I figured I'd play with all the new
> buzzwords while I had the opportunity -- and partman made it all quite
> simple!
>
> Once I had my system up and running, I decided to go back and tweak a
> couple things in the partitioning / LVM / RAID scheme. After looking
> for a bit, I didn't find a utility [1] quite as good as partman for
> this task, so I fell back to the command line utilities fdisk, lvm,
> and mdadm. My sense of it is that there isn't a tool packaged in
> Debian to fill this need -- although feel free to give suggestions at
> this point.
>
> I suggest one of two things, or if there's time both! 1. Port partman
> from debian-installer to make it a full fledged utility. 2. Port
> whatever tool Red Hat uses [2] for this same task and package it for
> Debian. I haven't used the latter, so the former would be my
> preference. Can someone more familiar with partman and
> debian-installer give an indication of how much work this would be?
>
> Cheers!
> Shaun
>
> [1] qtparted is a nice tool, but doesn't handle LVM or RAID yet as far
> as I know. webmin-lvm is a capable looking tool though.
>
> [2] I think this tool might be called DiskDruid, but I'm quite out of
> touch with Red Hat state-of-the-art.
FYI: Martin Loschwitz (madkiss) is working on the Yast partitioner
module (from SuSe), part of the Yast for Debian project.
MfG
Goswin
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