[ale] Linux Server distros

[Greg Freemyer]

On 7/25/06, Benjie <benjie.godfrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/25/06, Sean Kilpatrick <drifter at oppositelock.org> wrote:
> > On Tuesday 25 July 2006 21:31, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> >  It can be hard to setup. For most people it is not needed. Also, RedHat
> >  had a bad implementation back around RH9 that caused MUCH grief and
> >  scared off many people.
> >
>
> I don't understand why people wouldn't need it?  Unless of course
> their data doesn't grow.  I can't tell you how many times under Linux
> I wished I could add another drive and extend the filesystem instead
> of switch out drives for something larger, or having to add a drive
> and go through the craziness of creating links all over the place to
> keep some sort of continuity for a process.  LVM was something I
> couldn't wait for in Linux.  As for problems with RH9 and LVM, I guess
> I missed out on that.  I had a fileserver running RH9 with a shared
> volume using lvm, and it didn't skip a beat as a samba/nfs file
> server.  ( I did run into a nasty problem with NIS on that server.)
>
> Benjie
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>

I've been using LVM with SUSE for about 3 years now.  The basic
functionality I've had little problem with.  (Certainly not as much as
I had with LVM under Tru64 previously).

But with LVM snapshots, it is another story.  My efforts have all been
LVM/XFS combined.  That worked for later 2.4 kernels.  (I can't
remember, but in the SuSE world it was around 8.2 that LVM/XFS
snapshots worked.  IIRC, my main fileserver still runs 8.2 or 9.0
because of this issue.)

With 2.6.x I'm still waiting for reliable snapshot operation.  For the
last year I've had a small fileserver running a 2.6.x kernel.  I have
it upgraded to 2.6.16 currently (SuSE 10.1).  Still snapshots fail
routinely.  ie. several times a week, one of my filesystems fails to
get backed up that night due to a snapshot failure.

Redhat keeps claiming that they are working on the snapshot code and
improvements are going into mainline, but somehow my 2.6.x test system
never works as good as the old 2.4.x implementation.

Greg
-- 
Greg Freemyer
The Norcross Group
Forensics for the 21st Century