[ale] Looking for recommendations on LVM + soft Raid on home server

[Robert]

>Now, I've already messed with logging in as root, unmounting /home
>and /u, and resizing both. 
>
>However, I had to unmount them in order for the native LVM to be willing
>to do that. which makes perfect sense. 

I haven't found that to be the case. I regularly resize /, /home, /usr, etc on
my machines, with no problem. This is for ext* filesystems, I don't know if
other filesystems have more restrictions. It goes something like this:

 # lvextend -L +4g /dev/vg/root
 # resize2fs /dev/vg/root

It's a little more complicated for shrinking, and I think that you do need a
rescue disk to shrink anything you can't unmount, like /.