[Gllug] One step forward - 2 steps back

[Ian Northeast]

Nix wrote:

> My fear over upgrading my LVMed boxes was holding me back: no longer!
> 
> (They're entirely LVMed except for /... a disk-format change with no
> downgrade path would have been... annoying.)

It can be a lot trickier if / is in LVM. I tried for a little while to 
get a "technology preview" of SuSE Enterprise 9 to LVM2. This comes with 
an optional 2.6 kernel and the instructions for its use helpfully say 
"upgrade to LVM2 first" but go into no detail. Their initrd creating 
script does not support LVM2 and this was the problem. I hacked around 
with it for a bit but basically only succeeded in finding new and 
interesting ways of making Linux not boot:)

I had to wipe out that installation for some other testing so I decided 
to wait and see if they've sorted this a bit better in the released 
version which I understand is imminent.

BTW this did make me think about whether putting / in LVM had any 
advantage at all. I had never had to enlarge / on Linux. I always size 
it generously (i.e. about 200M). But then a colleague installed a piece 
of Novell software (Zen, a PC software distribution management system) 
and its stupid installer insisted on creating huge temporary files in 
~root. So he had to enlarge it. That would have been tricky if I hadn't 
put it in LVM. Novell say "fixed in next release" and "hacking our 
install scripts is not supported".

Regards, Ian

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