[TriLUG] Small business server setup

[Magnus]

On Friday, November 28, 2003, at 09:51  PM, Justin Johnson wrote:

> So what other distros are others considering moving to in face of Red 
> Hat
> dropping support for Red Hat 9?

My short list right now:

Fedora Core (though I am not inspired by the hybrid 
commercial/community ownership of the distro)
Mandrake (might get dropped for lack of kickstart... and no don't tell 
me about DrakX)
White Box
cAos

My technical requirements include RPM-based and kickstart-capable to 
reduce the re-engineering necessary to migrate from Red Hat Linux 9.

Boss says it must be free (as in Free Beer).

I say it must be free (as in Free Speech).

> I'll thnak you and the others that where involved inthe thread on LVM 
> in the
> recent past. I don't remeber the ins and outs, but I do remeber it 
> sounded
> like a no brainer to use. The only thing that scares me is that it 
> sounds
> "too good to be true". Does it really work as well as it sounded?

Red Hat's fork of the Linux kernel breaks LVM.  I don't know if the 
most recent updates fix this because I am now running the kernel.org 
kernel to get away from the broken mess that comes with RH9.  Under the 
stock kernel it works largely as expected until you try to mount a 
snapshot.  Seems to trace back to one of the many patches RH applies to 
the kernel in the spec file.  If you comment out the patch, it works.  
Ugh.  Running kernel.org official kernel is so much cleaner and thus 
far more reliable.

If you use ext3 please *only* use e2fsadm for growing/shrinking your 
LV's.  It is smart enough to change the LV size *and* the filesystem.  
The LVM supplied tools are FS-agnostic so will only change the size of 
the logical volume but not the filesystem.  Also, for the time being, 
you have to unmount an ext3 volume to change its size.  This may 
require dropping to single user mode, depending on what FS you're 
working on.

If you keep those things in mind you should do fine.

--

C. Magnus Hedemark
http://trilug.org/~chrish
"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink 
what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not." - Mark Twain