On 02/28/2014 08:45 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 7:28 AM, Lamar Owen lowen@pari.edu wrote:
This keeps /home and /var in separate filesystems, too, and there are advantages to that.
'Resize as needed' is not at all the same as sharing a pool of space.
Exactly, and I would posit that that is desirable when dealing with /home and /var.
There are sometimes advantages to having things not share disk heads or spindles, but you don't need LVM for that, and sometimes (rarely) you might want to reinstall without reformatting /home,
The nice thing about LVM in this context is that you can take the whole non-root volume group and import it into the new machine with minimal effort. /var is a bit tedious, but /home on the other hand benefits greatly from this. And I've used a separate /home since... well, since RHL betas were named after cities. I've reinstalled without reformatting /home on my whatever-is-the-current-hardware personal machine over a hundred times since 1998, and have *kept* the *same* /home (in essence). Admittedly, I have had to move some things out of the way (.kde, and a few other configs over the years) and of course I've moved it to different drives (about two dozen at this point, not counting backups), but my /home today still contains files from 1998, when I first started doing this (you know, things like old TRS-80 disk images for the xtrs emulator that I pulled from 20-year-old-media in the 1998-2002 timeframe).
While it would not be technically true that I've never reformatted /home during the install, since when moving to a new drive it is a bit easier to do the install with the existing /home partition or volume group unmounted, then edit /etc/fstab later, or even install to a scratch new drive, leaving the space for /home to later be copied over from the old media or a backup, but in essence I've gone 16 years with pretty much the same, ever-changing, /home on my personal machine.