Recently I had to reinstall a system at office with Debian Wheezy and I thought I should use this opportunity to experiment with LVM. Yeah I've not used LVM till date, even though I'm using Linux for more than 5 years now. I know many DD friends who use LVM with LUKS encryption and I always wanted to experiment, but since my laptop is only thing I've and its currently perfectly in shape I didn't dare to experiment it there. This reinstall was golden opportunity for me to experiment and learn something new.
I used Wheezy CD ISO downloaded using jigdo for installation. Now I will just go bit off topic and want to share the USB stick preparation. I have to say this because I had not done installation for quite a while now. Last I did was during Squeeze time so like usual I blindly executed following command.
cat debian-wheezy.iso > /dev/sdb
Surprisingly USB stick didn't boot! I was getting Corrupt or missing ISO.bin. So next I tried using dd for preparing.
dd if=debian-wheezy.iso of=/dev/sdb
Surprisingly this also didn't work and I get same error message as above. This is when I went back to debian manual and looked for installation step and there I found new way!
cp debian-wheezy.iso /dev/sdb
Look at destination, its a device and voilà this worked! This is something new I learnt and I'm surprised how easy it is now to prepare USB stick. But I still didn't get why first 2 methods failed!. If you guys know please do share.
Now coming back to LVM. I used default LVM when disk partitioning was asked, and I used guided partitioning method provided by debian-installer and ended up with following layout
$ lvs
LV VG Attr LSize Pool Origin Data% Move Log Copy% Convert
home system-disk -wi-ao-- 62.34g
root system-disk -wi-ao-- 9.31g
swap_1 system-disk -wi-ao-- 2.64g
So guided partitioning of debian-installer allocates 10G for root and rest to home and swap. This is not a problem but when I started installing required software, I could see root running out of space quickly so I wanted to resize root and give it 10G more, for this I need to reduce the home by 10G for which I need to first unmount the home partition. Unmounting home from running system isn't possible so I booted into recovery assuming I can unmount home there but I couldn't. lsof didn't show any one using /home after searching a bit I found fuser command and it looks like kernel is using /home which is mounted by it.
$ fuser -vm /home
USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
/home: root kernel mount /home
So it isn't possible to unmount /home in recovery mode also. Online materials told me to use live-cd for doing this but I didn't have patience to do that so I just went ahead commented /home mounting in /etc/fstab and rebooted!. This time it worked and /home is not mounted on recovery mode. Now comes the hard part resizing home, thanks to TLDP doc on reducing I coud do this with following step
# e2fsck -f /dev/volume-name/home
# resize2fs /dev/volume-name/home 52G
# lvreduce -L-10G /dev/volume-name/home
And now the next part live extending the root partition again thanks to TLDP doc on extending following command did it.
# lvextend -L+10G /dev/volume-name/root
# resize2fs /dev/volumne-name/root
And now important part! Uncomment /home line in /etc/fstab so it will be mounted normally in next boot and reboot! On login I can see my partitions updated.
# lvs
LV VG Attr LSize Pool Origin Data% Move Log Copy% Convert
home system-disk -wi-ao-- 52.34g
root system-disk -wi-ao-- 19.31g
swap_1 system-disk -wi-ao-- 2.64g
I've started liking LVM more now! :)