[linux-lvm] [BUG] Spaces in LVM1 LV names => *deep trouble* when converting to LVM2

[Dominique Quatravaux <dom@idealx.com>]

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Hi, I encountered a very serious bug with LVM today. I'm using
lvm2-2.01.04-5 from Debian stable, kernel 2.6.17-rc3

# lvm version
  LVM version:     2.01.04 (2005-02-09)
  Library version: 1.01.00-ioctl (2005-01-17)
  Driver version:  4.6.0

What I did:

    * created a LV in an LVM1 VG using EVMS (yeah, I know) with a
      space in the name (yeah, yeah, I know, I know :-));
    * converted the VG to LVM2 using vgconvert;
    * as a result the space in the LVM1 metadata was converted over
      into a space in LVM2 textual metadata, which causes a nice
      "Parse error line 123" for every subsequent LVM command on that
      VG, including "vgcfgrestore"...

Of course I did that on the root VG of my work laptop (Backups? What
backups?) and ended up in the aforementioned pickle. I tried some dd
stunts to overwrite the space with a dash, having discovered the
correct offset and block size with strace() (which for the record were
respectively one block and 2560 bytes, YMMV) - But bummer, some
wiseguy put a CRC32 checksum in there! :-) I had to recompile a custom
version of lvm that passes NULL as the checksum_fn parameter to
text_vg_import_fd (again for the record, that's a trivial one-line
patch in function _vg_read_raw_area, in format-text.c around line 286).

The situation definitely needs some fixing. My humble suggestions:

    * vgconvert should surface-test the LVM1 metadata as strictly as
      the command-line "lvcreate" tool does on its arguments;
    * there should be a mechanism for dealing with corrupt LVM
      metadata, at the minimum a global command-line switch to
      temporarily disable checksum verifications.

Now investigating backup software *real seriously* :-) Thanks for your
work on the Linux LVM suite,

- --
Dominique QUATRAVAUX                           Ing�nieur senior
01 44 42 00 08                                 IDEALX

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