Debian and LVM

Junichi Uekawa asks about the support in Debian for LVM, and whether one can use LVM on the root filesystem.

There’s a question about the installer. I confess complete ignorance regarding debian-installer, but Anaconda for Debian has been doing LVM for a while now, on the root or just about any other partition. Once you get the system installed (either via native installer support or via some command-line manual setup), Debian’s infrastructure seems to have no difficulty. This is a configuration Progeny tests fairly regularly, so I’d expect everything to be OK.

Of course, one should not put /boot under anything besides a regular partition, which means that /boot should be mounted if the root is in a LVM. I’ve also heard that root LVMs under Linux are a pain to maintain. Nevertheless, there should be nothing Debian-specific about recommendations regarding the use of LVM.

UPDATE: Andrew Pollock reports that debian-installer supports LVM just fine, and complains about being forced to use LILO instead of GRUB as the boot loader. Actually, that’s one of the benefits of /boot being on a regular partition. I think it’s safer to keep all boot information outside systems like LVM as a general rule; getting GRUB back is a nice additional perk.

ZoneAlarm Customer Advisory

I’ve mentioned the ZoneAlarm Windows personal firewall to people in the past, so I feel honor-bound to pass this report on. I have no first-hand experience with ZoneAlarm, so I can’t say for sure if this is real. But if you use ZoneAlarm (or have used it in the past) and you start having problems with Mozilla Firefox, you might want to follow the post’s instructions for fixing the problem.

(Seen via Dean Esmay.)