20 Oct 09 Setting up an LVM filesystem

Setting up an LVM filesystem is quite easy assuming you have the right tools installed and a recent kernel. LVM has a lot of advantages, most notably the ability to take snapshots of the current filesystem – this is why LVM is often used in live database environments.

Assuming a Debian Lenny machine, get the relevant packages. Some may already be installed:  apt-get install lvm2 dmsetup mdadm

In this example, we will assuming that /dev/sda is your boot drive, and that you want to leave it out of your LVM array, but include /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc. Both /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc should be of equal sizes.

Firstly, using fdisk, remove any existing partitions with ‘d’, on /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc, and create one new partition to span the drive. Change the partition type to ’8e’ which is the LVM type.

Now prepare your physical disk for LVM with the ‘pvcreate’ tool:

pvcreate /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1

Note that you can reverse this with pvremove. You can also use pvdisplay now to display information on all physical volumes.

Oh – you do realie that you can use /dev/mdX just as easily to create LVM on your RAID devices?

Now, we need to create a ‘volume group’: vgcreate myvg /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1

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Tags: dd, ext3, kernel, Linux, lvcreate, lvdisplay, lvm, lvremove, mkfs, mount, pvcreate, pvdisplay, pvremove, resize, tar, vgcreate, vgdisplay, vgremove, xen

05 Oct 08 APNIC Box – Linux on a Mikrotik 532a, Part 3 – Installing Debian, Prebuilt Disk Image

Follow on from 01 Oct 08 APNIC Box – Linux on a Mikrotik 532a, Part 2

The device runs a 2.4.30 kernel on a debian woody (mipsel) environment. If anyone can contribute anything for 2.6.x and debian etch, that would be great.

In this part, I’m going to provide a download link to a prebuilt image which you can write directly onto your own CF card with dd or similar tool. I’m also going to provide a step by step to installing debian yourself without my prebuilt disk image.

Prebuilt image is here:

The prebuilt image also contains a number of scripts and tools that I’ll comment on and come to in later parts.

Now installation instructions:
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Tags: 532a, apnicbox, apt-get, atftpd, CF, compile, cross compile, Custom Kernel, dd, debian, dhcpd, dhcpd.conf installer, forward, initrd, initrd.gz, iptables, ip_forward, kernel, Linux, linuxrc, masquerade, mikrotik, mipsel, mkfs, mknod, mount, partition, prebuild image, routerboard, routerboard 532a, scripts, sed, tftpd, vmlinux, wget