Controlling servers (e.g. apache, samba)

[Gabriel Dragffy]

Derek Broughton wrote:
> Gabriel Dragffy wrote:
> 
>> This is going a bit off-topic now with partitioning......
>> If you are setting up partitions for linux, you'd be crazy not to go
>> with LVM, you can increase the size of logical volumes online, and
>> shrink them offline. All the problems that you say you encountered are
>> solved by LVM. Obviously LVM won't play nice with OS X but you can do:
>> 100MB primary partition for /boot
>> 10GB primary partition for OS X
>> all the rest as a LVM, then you can install ubuntu in to the LVM and
>> other distros too.
> 
> Do you do that?  I'm really uncomfortable with the idea of my root partition
> in the LVM.  I'm not really sure what _could_ happen, but I worry that if
> the device starts to fail there may be nothing at all recoverable if I
> can't get into the LVM and mount the root.  So I put / on a physical
> partition but everything else in the LVM.


Sure, I put everything I can into LVM. If you need to access it you can 
boot up from a knoppix cd and modprobe dm-mod then you can fiddle around 
with the data, as easily as if it's on a standard partition. Also  I 
should say that if you are concerned about failing devices, then using 
standard paritions won't protect you one iota. Best off coming up with a 
better backup strategy.
Besides I find that reinstalling a system completely only takes a few 
hours, just make sure that my user data is backed up, because that's 
taken literally years to acquire, and no amount of time/money could 
bring it back.

Personally I have a script in cron.hourly that runs rsync, copying from 
my /home to a USB hard drive. In the eventuality of a lightening strike 
it's game over, but there's not much I can do against that considering 
the amount of time and money I am prepared to put in (nothing). But it 
does a fantastic job of protecting against device failure.