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Article posted on Jan 10

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Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 10, 2005, 2:46 am

LVM is kickass; it allows you to take "X" hard drives (physical volumes) and turn them into "Y" logical volumes. This is most commonly used to combine several hard drives (usually of different size drives, which you can't do with RAID0) into one mega-partition. However, you can do nearly anything with LVM... 5 evenly-sized logical volumes across 3 drives for example. FC3 and RHEL4 beta even default to putting all but the /boot partitions on LVM, even if you only have one disk. This is because it is trivial to add a new hard drive and extend any of the logical volumes onto it.

However, I've found that while going the other way (reduzing logical volumes to remove a drive) is possible, it's time-consuming. However, at least it's possible, which is still immensely cool. Here's the deal: we have several backup servers at work; the office backup server is a 850GB reiserfs partition on LVM, spread over 3 200GB disks and a 250GB disk (it used to be a 200GB, but that went bad and maxtor sent a 250GB as a replacement). However, I'm seeing errors on another of the disks, and want to remove it to RMA, but I would rather not erase the data. (This is meant to be a snapshot backup server, but it's still nice to not lose data if I can afford it.)

Here's what I have to do:
* Unmount the LV
* Use resize_reiserfs to shrink the partition (to 400GB in this case). This took about 30 minutes.
* At this point, the LV can be remounted. Everything below can be done "on-line".
* Use lvreduce to reduce the size of the logicial volume to slightly over the size of the partition (I did 410GB just to be safe). This took only a few seconds.
* Use pvmove to move any blocks from the logical volumes that currently reside on the dying disk to other physical volumes. I'm doing this now and it looks like it'll take about 4 hours.
* Do "vgreduce vgnas /dev/hde1". I'm referring to specifics here so I don't have to go back to the FAQ when the time comes. :) This removes the physical volume from the volume group. (A volume group is a central layer between the physical and logical volumes.)
* Reboot, remove the drive, replace.
* Boot, and mount logical volume (which should be very usable at this point, just missing a drive).

And in reverse (again, I'm publicly making a todo list):
* Add disk, reboot, fdisk, and add new partition with type 8e (Linux LVM).
* pvcreate /dev/hde1 ("Format" the partition, if you will)
* vgextend vgnas /dev/hde1 (Extend the volume group to include the new disk)
* lvextend -L+999G /dev/vgnas/lvnas (I need to find out if I can tell lvextend to extend the LV to its maximum size)
* Unmount LV.
* resize_reiserfs /dev/vgnas/lvnas (Resizes the filesystem to the max size of the LV)
* Mount LV.
* Drink beer.

Hopefully this will go as expected.

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Article posted on Jan 6

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Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 6, 2005, 7:55 pm

Some guy decided to call 867-5309 in each area code.

It's funny sorting through the data, but if you can, dial (678) 867-5309 RIGHT NOW. It's funny.

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Article posted on Jan 5

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Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 5, 2005, 6:26 am

My first cingular bill was made available online today. 1079 text messages used, and they decided to list each one on its own line (not the contents, but the existence of said messages). Therefore, the PDF bill was 31 pages long.

I can't wait until my paper copy arrives in the mail :)

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Article posted on Jan 4

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Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 4, 2005, 1:13 am

MakeMeMyDateMatch.com (don't ask how I found this)

1) Name makes no sense whatsoever.
2) The site just seems to be trying to make click-thru referrals to true.com
3) Look at the couple's hands in the right picture.

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Article posted on Jan 2

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Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 2, 2005, 2:32 am

Yeesh, you buy 1 erotic photography book a couple years ago, and they never let you forget it.

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Article posted on Jan 1

Half-Life 2 Hawt Lesbian Action!

Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 1, 2005, 5:23 am

Garry's Mod is evil. Once you realize you can pose people, you start getting naughty thoughts. Though it does take forever to get the shot "just right".