Bad luck and some mistakes
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| jhansonxi Jul 24, 2008 9:32 AM EDT |
I can appreciate your frustration. It's unfortunate but it happens and in your case it was a combination of bad luck, early adoption of unfinished features, and mistakes. You got burned by the unforeseen deprecation of EVMS. You know the routine - if it's open source you can fix it yourself or organize a group who has a shared interest in doing so. You made some early mistakes with drive configuration and partitioning. It happens to most beginners as the filesytem hierarchy is confusing and you don't know how much space to reserve for each directory tree. Inadequate backup system - you know better. Shame on you. On Ubuntu Hardy Heron I am using RAID1 > LVM > LUKS/dm-crypt. I have a small RAID1 partition mounted as /boot, a second 2G RAID1 for LUKS/dm-crypt swap, and the rest as a RAID1 LVM physical device. Within the LVM there are several logical volumes which are individually encrypted. I have volumes for /, /usr/local (unmanaged third-party games mostly), and several for various home directories. Except for the root volume I don't enter individual decryption keys for anything. Swap is unlocked and mounted via /etc/crypttab using a preset key. Home directories are mounted similarly using pam_mount. The keys I keep in /etc/keys/dm-crypt/ which is readable only by root. Setting this all up was not easy. The Ubuntu Alternate CD has to be used and the partman has a lot of bugs and fundamental design flaws ( [url=https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/ source/mdadm/ bug/68308]https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/ source/mdadm/ bug/68308[/url] ). I've found workarounds like allocating space for swap but not formatting or using it until after install else partman fails. Fedora and Suse have user-friendlier tools for it but they can't handle RAID + LVM + LUKS/dm-crypt all at the same time. I refuse to spend time making custom images with custom initrd scripts just to make them work. For management I agree that there needs to be some GUI tools. Webmin does handle RAID and LVM but it's overkill, tedious, and doesn't handle LUKS/dm-crypt. But some management tasks like resizing are hard to implement with a GUI on a running system. Mounted volumes can't be messed with usually and only some filesystems can be resized. LUKS/dm-crypt volumes are difficult to resize in-place. Basically doing anything other than informing you that the RAID is desynched (cat /proc/mdstat) is difficult. A LiveCD designed for a specific distribution to support common management tasks would be more practical. But you made one decision I don't understand. Why install Windows to a partition when you could have used a VM? I run Altium DXP on Windows XP in VMware Player 2 without any problems. I store the image file on DVD so I can delete it from the drive if I need more space. Dual-booting is obsolete. |
| Sander_Marechal Jul 24, 2008 2:46 PM EDT |
Here's another oddity I spotted:Quoting:after I successfully shrunk my LVM container, I couldn't figure out how to shrink the md0 software-RAID partition. Turned out it wasn't possible in EVMS. And worse, IBM - the maintainer of EVMS - stopped to maintain it. EVMS is just a front-end. You could have easily used the mdadm CLi tools to shrink md0. |
| hkwint Jul 25, 2008 12:47 AM EDT |
Quoting:nadequate backup system - you know better. Shame on you. Indeed; that's the main problem. Quoting:Why install Windows to a partition when you could have used a VM? Ah, forgot about that. I had 'problems' installing the VMWare-tools which made it all very slow; too slow to work with. The problem was I just didn't know how to install VMWare-tools. I thought it had to be done from Linux with a package from some repository. If that's the way you're searching, it's going to take a long time. At this moment, AutoCAD runs beautifully in a VM, and the native Windows installation is entirely gone! The only problem is AD Inventor needs 3D acceleration for an acceptable result. VirtualBox doesn't provide that, otherwise I wouldn't be using VMWare, and for VMWare 3D acceleration is beta at this moment. I once got DirectX9 working in VMWare, but sometimes it crashed. Right now Inventor uses the OpenGL 3D-acceleration in VMware, but still it sometimes crasheh. Performance is rather good though, but I did have to expand my RAM beyond 1GB because that was not enough. Quoting: You could have easily used the mdadm CLi tools to shrink md0. Something tells me I have been trying that and failed, but I'm not exactly sure what I did and where it went wrong. Probably when I ran LVM instead of EVMS. I should have ran mdadm without EVMS to shrink it before running LVM without EVMS. OK, that's for next time! |
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