From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <37BD9B5B.A1247F83@mainland.ab.ca> Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 12:15:55 -0600 From: Drew Smith Mime-Version: 1.0 Subject: [linux-lvm] LVM and Debian Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-lvm Errors-To: owner-linux-lvm List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: linux-lvm@msede.com Hello, all. Just joined in on the list - of course, to show proper etiquette, I read the archives first, to catch up on the topics discussed. Something I didn't see, however, were comments on the stablility of the LVM code under Debian Potato. Some background - I'm an AIX guy, working for a consulting company that specializes in storage management. Wow, that sound WAY less fun than it actually is - basically, I'm a 23-year-old, fifth-year linux geek who managed to land a job doing unix-ish things. Some more background - in our house, we're running just under 200G of disk - the shoutcast "BeNOW" (http://www.benow.org) is running in the server room, right off my bedroom. I'm not the originator of it, but I'm a full partner and am the administrator of the servers it runs on. And even more - we have friends, here in Calgary, that have the reclaimant contracts on used gear. Basically, they pick up truckloads of Unix hardware from large corporations, give them tax credits, and sell it all off. They've got exclusive contracts with a lot of places, so they're an incredible resource. They're not out to turn a profit, just make a living - so incredible deals. The deal I'm referring mostly to is the "9G fullheight Seagate SCSI drive, 1M cache, 5500 RPM, 9ms access" for $50 CAD. We bought eight. LVM comes into play here. So I did manage to get 0.7 to compile happily under Debian - using 2.2.10-ac12. This was difficult, and I've discovered why - either Debian or LVM isn't properly referencing where the includes are stored. My fix was: cd /root/LVM/0.7/tools ln -s /usr/src/linux/includes/linux linux make This worked. I plugged in four of the 9G drives - would have been eight, but I blew one of the two power supplies in the "cube" (a four-beside-four fullheight enclosure) when I didn't set the drives to delayed powerup. I created a 33G volume group called "rootvg" (sue me, I learned LVM on AIX) and created a 33G lv called lv01 inside that. My problems begin here - it worked happily! I shared it out to the others via Samba, and they happily drug and dropped mass quantities of .MP3's to it. After a while, it crashed. I'm sort of hypothesizing that it crashed as it hit the end of the first drive - I'm only doing a linear setup, no stripes. Roughly at the time that it WOULD have hit 9G, it locked the system solid, requiring a power-down. Unfortunately, the machine doesn't have a head most of the time, so no errors were noted. Since then, I've compiled 2.2.11-ac3, and have been working on getting the same setup running again - with one exception. I tried to put a fifth drive in the machine, INSIDE the actual desktop case - and it seems I don't own a single 50-pin ribbon cable that is clean enough to avoid timeouts. At 2am, I powered it off and left it for my bed - had to be up at 6 for work. To give a long story another paragraph, I'll be continuing the struggle tonight. Has anyone had any problems with stability under Debian, and/or tracked down what those might stem from? I'm running the machine now with it's own monitor (a rarity in the server room - nearing 20 machines now) and keyboard, constantly keeping an eye on it. I'll be setting it up again tonight with the same setup, 33G, but most likely striped. Looking through the list, I don't see many people detailing what they ARE doing with LVM, just what they CAN'T do, and asking for help. I apologize if I've offended anyone with the length of this post - but this is what I like to read, and I'd love to see what other people are doing with this software. If it's to be included in kernel 2.4, we'd damn well better push it to it's limits! :) Cheers, - Drew.