[vdr] Re: OT: LVM

[Lauri Pesonen <lauri.pesonen@iki.fi>]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 03:23:24PM +0100, Steffen Koch wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> since I'm restructuring my VDR environment, I'm going to have the video
> directory mounted via NFS from my server.
> On the server side I want to use LVM for the video dir. Does someone
> have any experiences he/she wants to share
> regarding LVM and filesystem setup?

I can say that I've used it for 6 months without a glitch. My system is 
going through a big overhaul so I'm installing everything from scratch 
right now, but I think I'll use LVM again. My first concern was 
performance, but that did not seem to be a problem after all (at most 2 
simultanious recordings). 

There was a disk discussion on the list a while back about how to use
multiple disks. People seemed to prefer either RAID5 or then multiple
independent disks which all contained complete recordings (as opposed to
VDRs default way of placing files all over the place). RAID5 is obviously
the best solution, but you will loose some disk space and you need to buy
additional hardware (the RAID card). Using independent disks requires some
planning and manual (?) work in organising recordings. 

I like LVM since it provides me with a big chunk of disk space which I can 
modify by adding new volumes to it or removing existing ones. Buying a new 
disk and adding it to the system is very simple. You can also remove 
physical disks from the system easily. The obvious downside is that you 
will probably loose all your recordings if one of the disks fails. I don't 
personally really care about this since I use VDR mostly to record series 
which I watch once and delete. So missing one episode will not drive me to 
suicide. 

A final note: do not use XFS as the file system for LVM. XFS is not 
resizeable which means that you cannot remove disks from your LVM system. 
The process would normally go like this: resize filesystem, free LVM 
extents from the given disk, remove disk from LVM, remove disk from PC. 
Unfortunately XFS is not resizeable, so you will have to recreate the 
whole LVM if you want to remove a single disk.

-- 
  Lauri


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