Linux Neophyte

LVM is an acronym for Linux Volume Management. Simplified, LVM allows you to lay out a logical partition scheme with the ability to increase or decrease the volumes as need arises (among other things). That’s WAY over simplified.

As it turns out, building your own study guide is a fairly complex process. Which how-tos and docs are the best/most accurate? I’ve been lightly reading over what I’ve found and here’s what I’m using to attempt to teach myself how to utilize LVM.

Notes:

I will most likely be using Debian (etch) for my testing and the server I’ll be building after the fact. I find that Debian and it’s derivatives tend to be well documented and have oodles of software available “out of the box”. Even if software isn’t available, I’ve had luck compiling on Debian (probably due to good documentation). Debian has slow official release cycles and that’s perfect when your building a server based on their stable branch. I don’t want to have to worry about upgrading the machine every 6 months

Reading material:

• Managing Disk Space with LVM (linuxdevcenter.com) - quick read, pretty pictures
• Simple Intro to Working with LVM (debian-administration.org) - quick read, ugly pictures
• LVM HowTo (tldp.org) - large and in-depth
• Man pages

Reading and practice material:

• A beginner’s guide to LVM (howtoforge.com) - Not only is this inspired by the linuxdevcenter.com & debian-administration.org docs above, but it comes with a VMware appliance already set up and ready for you to hack on and ruin and start all over with. Now THAT is how you learn!
• Once I’ve mucked about with the VM image above and feel comfortable, I’ll be building a few of my own VM images and seeing what I can do with LVM myself.

Thoughts before getting started:

• Can one use a live CD to recover data from a machine with an LVM configuration?
• Can one have a multi-boot system and read/write data on another Linux install if that install is configured to use LVM?
• If one was to have a multi-boot system, would LVM be a really bad idea? (that sorta depends on the answer to the question above)
• What am I not thinking of? (always the last question I ask myself)

So now that I have something to read, I just need to start reading. Hopefully I can find some night this week to plow through the docs once or twice and then start ruining VMs - This is my first month long learning project, I reckon I’ll start the timer whenever I start actually reading.

written by M@ \\ tags: Apps, LVM