Quotes of the week

Poor device management is something that's confused me for a long time in Linux - almost
enough to want to scratch the itch myself, but not quite.

What I really want is what I had back in the old Novell Netware days - I had a logical volume
and a physical volume.  At any time, I could:

 * Add a physical volume as a mirror or additional space.
 * Grow a logical volume across available space in the physical volume.

And this was all relatively straight forward.  What surprises me is that with EVMS, LVM2,
mdadm, or any other fancy tools, I haven't found a way of making it so that I can configure a
system such that any system I start out with can suddenly become mirrored.  There's always a
complaint about there not being enough room for the metadata, or some step that requires me to
have thought about what I might want to do in the future.  And mirroring later on is my
biggest requirement.  Suddenly I discover that a drive's worth of data is more precious than I
thought, so I want to add protection to it.

The NetWare solution was particularily cool in that it could do this with any set of block
devices it could see.  This meant that setups like SFT3 were really natural, where disks were
mirrored across multiple machines.

Sadly, this is a space that AFAIK only Novell ever got super-right, in that it was always
there, you could always do it, and the commands to do it were simple enough that even book
CNEs could generally handle all the mirroring and remirroring tasks without worrying if they
were going to get the mirrors in the wrong direction.

Tks,
Jeff Bailey (Who wants volume management like we had it in 1993)