Can’t figure out why I haven’t played with LVM before, but I took a bunch of old drives (2x80GB, 2x46GB, and 2x60GB) and stuffed them in a machine I wasn’t using, installed Annvix on it, and made a 345GB LVM partition that spans all six drives. Very slick! Now I can rectify a stupid mistake I made on my Mandriva x86_64 build machine (had 2x250GB drives in there but made them a RAID1 set… now I have 20GB free and all I can think of is how much nicer it would be to have 500GB to store stuff I can either re-download or re-copy from the install CDs/DVDs (it’s my repository for every file we’ve ever put into a distro, and tracking cooker, across two platforms for all currently supported distros, including cooker)).
So now the big rsync from one machine to the other begins, then I can make an LVM set of the two 250GBs, and then rsync everything back. Lots of work, but at least I won’t have to worry about running out of space anytime soon, and it’s especially important with Corp4 coming soon, as well as 2007 (and even though 10.0 will be EOL, I need to keep the packages for help with Corp3, and even though Corp2.1 will be EOL, it takes up very little space so that doesn’t save me much).
Dunno why I never played with LVM before… looks like it could be pretty useful if you did LVM over RAID (I’m already thinking of 4x250GB or 6x250GB drives with an LVM over RAID giving me a single 750GB RAID1 partition which would make a kick-ass fileserver).