Controlling servers (e.g. apache, samba)

[Derek Broughton]

Gabriel Dragffy wrote:

> Derek Broughton wrote:
>> 
>> I'm really uncomfortable with the idea of my root partition
>> in the LVM.  I'm not really sure what _could_ happen, but I worry that if
>> the device starts to fail there may be nothing at all recoverable if I
>> can't get into the LVM and mount the root.  So I put / on a physical
>> partition but everything else in the LVM.
> 
> 
> Sure, I put everything I can into LVM. If you need to access it you can
> boot up from a knoppix cd and modprobe dm-mod then you can fiddle around
> with the data, as easily as if it's on a standard partition.

I should see if that's possible from the Ubuntu CD.  I rather doubt it, as
the Live CD doesn't allow for LVM partitioning during the install.

> Also  I 
> should say that if you are concerned about failing devices, then using
> standard paritions won't protect you one iota. Best off coming up with a
> better backup strategy.

Murphy's law will tell you that no matter how good your backup strategy,
there's going to be something important on the drive that didn't yet get
backed up; and experience tells me that laptop drives _always_ fail.  Every
single laptop I have owned (four so far) has had to have a drive replaced. 
It could be me (I'm definitely hard on the hardware); it could be bad
choices of hardware; but it always happens.

> Besides I find that reinstalling a system completely only takes a few
> hours, just make sure that my user data is backed up, because that's
> taken literally years to acquire, and no amount of time/money could
> bring it back.

Yes it does just take a few hours - it's the recent work that is the
problem.  Now, that's not really a problem for me with respect to the root
partition anyway, because there's no user modified data on that partition
except what's in /etc - and even that is largely installed from packages or
debconf, but I still have qualms about having / on lvm.
> 
> Personally I have a script in cron.hourly that runs rsync, copying from
> my /home to a USB hard drive. 

Interesting.  I wouldn't want to copy all of /home/$USER - that's got GBs of
essentially static content, too, but everything that's routinely modified
is going to be under ~/Desktop/

Thanks.
-- 
derek