[dundee] a few questions re LVM, filesystems and VBox

Thu Sep 23 22:22:24 UTC 2010

I've done a lot with encryption + lvm and it's a pain in the ass?

have you though about using the new feature and just encrypting you home 
directory?

it's just do you really want to encrypt you whole drive, i mean, lots of people 
have the contents of you /bin
dir!!! :-) it may even make cryptographic attacks easier ;-).

the are a few downside, attacks could see your /var, but on  tyhe upside, you 
can probably recover from a corrupted hard drive
easier, than with a crypto drive.

pro's and con's...but if you really must do the whole drive, then let me know 
and I'll give you a heads up

Cheers,
Lee
3rd year comp sci.
somewhere in the dataverse

p.s. must make my return soon, watch out.

________________________________
From: gordon dunlop <zubenel at fedoraproject.org>
To: Tayside Linux User Group <dundee at lists.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Thu, 23 September, 2010 21:13:02
Subject: Re: [dundee] a few questions re LVM, filesystems and VBox

On 23 September 2010 09:02, garryg <gargul1969 at gmail.com> wrote:

Morning folks,
>
>I have a few questions for y'all and hope someone/anyone can help
>clear things up for me. I'll try to be as brief as poss.
>
>1) I've installed Ubuntu 9.10 using the alternate install cd so i
>could encrypt my hard drive and then partition using the LVM - that's
>all fine. After install, i can create new logical volumes ok but when
>mounted i only have ro permissions as group owner is root (still don't
>quite get that one when the LVs were created using my root pwd -
>another time for that one). Anyway, once the new LVs are mounted i can
>(re)format each LV using Ubuntu's Palimpsest Disk Utility and take
>ownership of the filesystem that way, getting me both read and write
>permissions. It just seems a pretty round about way of getting there
>and I'm pretty sure after a scan of lvm2 documentation that doing this
>would probably be a lot simpler from the command line, but i ain't
>there yet... So, basically, am i ok using this method to create new
>LVs or am i storing up future trouble for myself here by mixing lvm
>and disk utility to achieve my ends?
>
>I will  handle 1 & 3 together. Best thing for me to do is give you an example 
>overview.

 LVM, mount points & fstab:

 On installing your distro create your logical volumes with mount points, a bit 
like physical partitions with the added facility of having your own naming 
nomenclature for further logical volumes. eg

lvol1    /
lvol2   /home
lovl3   /var
lovl4  /vm

Entries would be automatically written in the /etc/fstab file for mounting these 
logical volumes at boot. If a new logical volume was then created with mount 
point  /backup then an entry will have to be made in the fstab file for this 
logical volume to be mounted at boot time. If you wanted it mounted after fstab 
entry without re-booting do a  "mount -a command". If you do not want a logical 
volume to mount at boot time just do manual mounting like what you are doing 
now.

Permissions:

After the creation of the logical volumes as defined above, all volumes and 
directories, with the exception of the directory garry in the /home volume, will 
be designated as having root permissions which is standard Linux policy and and 
maintains the security of the system. Permissions and read/write modes can be 
changed using super user status in the command line i.e. sudo for Ubuntu and 
using the chown,chgrp & chmod commands.

So the easiest thing to do is to create a directory e.g. machines (for storing 
your virtual images)in lvol4 (/vm) using sudo on the command line and then 
change the user and group to garry with read/write permissions.

I hope this explains things.

2) I wanna do a fresh install to get things ready for starting my OU
>course next month and wanna make a bunch of LVs for VMs as trying
>out/working with different distros is part of the course work i
>believe. However, the newest version of vbox (3.2.8 - not the ose)
>tells me it doesn't like being used on an ext4 fs. So, should i make
>them ext2 or ext3 or does it not really matter? Oh, thanks for the nod
>Gordon re using the most up-to-date version as i can get USB support
>no prob now which makes a big difference - i may even finally be able
>to get that damn dongle working through a hawk, spit, windows distro
>in a VM (i've tried and tried but just can't get it to work with
>Ubuntu unfortunately - i know it can be done but it's beyond me the
>now).
>
>
  There has been some problems with this new Virtualbox version and host ext4 
systems, have a look here:

http://forum.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&p=150220

I have had no problem with guest ext4 systems with this version.

Gordon

3) mount points: when creating a new partition(s) - LV or otherwise -
>should i be assigning mount points or is it ok to just mount when
>required as if they're external media? That's what i've been doing so
>far (they just get mounted at /media and all seems to work fine for me
>this way. Again though, i wonder if i'm storing up trouble going about
>things in this fashion?
>
>Ok, i'll leave it at that for now. Any and all input will be very much
>appreciated indeed. Thanks.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Garry.
>
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>

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