Controlling servers (e.g. apache, samba)

[Gabriel Dragffy]

Derek Broughton wrote:
> Gabriel Dragffy wrote:
> 
>> Derek Broughton wrote:
>>> 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.
> 
> I should see if that's possible from the Ubuntu CD.  I rather doubt it, as
> the Live CD doesn't allow for LVM partitioning during the install.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Murphy's law will tell you that no matter how good your backup strategy,
> there's going to be something important on the drive that didn't yet get
> backed up; and experience tells me that laptop drives _always_ fail.  Every
> single laptop I have owned (four so far) has had to have a drive replaced. 
> It could be me (I'm definitely hard on the hardware); it could be bad
> choices of hardware; but it always happens.
> 

That's bad luck, and precisely the reason why I suggest you have a more 
robust backup strategy. I don't see how having /root on a partition 
helps at, especially given the fact that no vital user data is stored on it.

>> 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.
> 
> Yes it does just take a few hours - it's the recent work that is the
> problem.  Now, that's not really a problem for me with respect to the root
> partition anyway, because there's no user modified data on that partition
> except what's in /etc - and even that is largely installed from packages or
> debconf, but I still have qualms about having / on lvm.

Well that's fine, if you feel more comfortable, then keep / serparte, 
you will sacrifice the ability to resize it though.

>> Personally I have a script in cron.hourly that runs rsync, copying from
>> my /home to a USB hard drive. 
> 
> Interesting.  I wouldn't want to copy all of /home/$USER - that's got GBs of
> essentially static content, too, but everything that's routinely modified
> is going to be under ~/Desktop/
> 

Rsync only copies changed files, I use:
rsync -av --delete --delete-excluded --exclude=vmware /home 
/media/LACIE/Backup

This one,