Solaris / Resizing LVM PVs (was: Debian experiences)

[Tom Buskey]

On 11/5/06, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/5/06, Tom Buskey <tom at buskey.name> wrote:
> >> Who wants a
> >> half-height, 18 GB SCSI drive, these days?
> >
> > Someone who runs older hardware at home
>
>   Yah, I used to do that, too.  But when you can get a PATA disk
> that's two orders of magnitude larger in capacity, half the size
> physically, a quarter of the heat and noise output, and five times
> faster, it gets hard to justify even "free" old hardware.

For disk drives, yeah.  But how much CPU do you really need for a file
server/dns/dhcp/web/a few other things?

> > I have a bunch of SATA drives in a "box" with a fan and a PC power
> > supply.  Long 42" SATA cables run from it to the controller in my home
> > server.
>
>   Yup, and with eSATA starting to take off, I expect this will become

I don't get what the deal is with eSATA.  I think it's just an
external port?  I have controller to 5" SATA extender cable, then 42"
SATA cable to disk.

> more and more common.  (Though I do wish something like Firewire had
> won out instead.  It would be nice to have just *one* cable running
> between the boxes.)

Yeah.  Well, there *is* USB 2.0.

> > That could be done with SCSI even more easily; one cable
> > going back to the controller.
>
>   Yup.  Old trick, and a great use for that extra AT tower case you
> had sitting around.  But see above about the march of hardware.  You
> can have the giant external SCSI JBOX, or a single PATA disk which
> holds twice as much.

Or, take that AT tower, stuff it with disks (primaryies, not
secondaries), controllers, fans and a gigabit ethernet card.  Throw
Linux in it w/ iSCSI target and RAID-5 and LVM the disks.  Or not.

Throw gigabit ethernet in your server and iSCSI initiator.  You have a SAN.

The hard part of that is cooling, power and monitoirng.  But it works.