A call for recomendations and helpful some advice

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, at 11:05am, pcmoore at engin.umich.edu wrote:
> One of my drives decided it had had enough of this cruel world and
> committed suicide this past Sunday, taking with it my /var partition.

  Ouch.  Got backups?

>  o Preserving a LVM set residing on a software RAID mirror
> 
> This machine has LVM running on top of a two disk software RAID mirror.  
> The filesystems affected are the user home directories and mail spools -
> i.e.  I don't want to trash this across system reloads.  Any special steps
> I need to take?  Can I simply recreate the RAID set and the LVM bits on
> the new system and it wil automagically detect the exsiting on-disk bits?

  As long as your distro supports both RAID and LVM (I know Red Hat does),
you shouldn't even really need to "recreate" anything.  In fact, I would shy
away from any such option, to avoid over-writing things.  The RAID subsystem
should detect the RAID superblocks and auto-start the RAID devices for them.  
Likewise, Red Hat runs the needed "vgscan" and "vgchange" commands at
startup to detect the LVM VGs and LVs.  All you should need to do is mount
the filesystem(s).

> I have run RedHat for a while now and as a result have gotten comfortable
> with it.  However, for what I want this machine to do RedHat has gotten
> rather bloated and cumbersome.

  So don't accept the default package sets.  Just install what you need.

> I am looking for a distro that does not require hundreds of 'packages' to
> be installed ...

  Well, I can't speak for 8.0, but I know that Red Hat 7.3 requires 136
packages for the "base" install, and you can remove quite a few of those if
you don't need the functionality they provide (e.g., you can remove
"reiserfs-utils" if you don't use reiserfs).

> ... provides an easy and automatic methos of updating them to deal with
> bugs, I have something like apt-get in mind here.

  Is there something particular about Red Hat's "up2date" that will not do
for you?  I'll readily admit "up2date" is not the generic, generalized
infrastructure tool that APT is, but it works well enough for keeping a Red
Hat system current with updates.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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