I’ll be down London way on Monday 25th July giving a talk about Ceph at the London Devops meetup. Come along and learn about petabyte scale distributed filesystems, or just come along and drink beer with us!
Tag: filesystem
Corrupted filesystem recovery dry-run with LVM snapshots
I have a corrupt Reiser filesystem that needs a tree rebuild on it, which can be a scary thing to do (and is only advised when you *really* do need to do it which, unfortunately, I do).
Now, this filesystem largely works, there is just a small part of it that causes problems when accessed. A rebuild could make things a lot worse, or it might just solve my problem (note: my problem appears NOT to be due to hardware failure. rebuilding the tree of a Reiser filesystem on hardware that has badsectors or whatever is VERY likely to make things worse. don’t do it).
So, I’m currently using the filesystem and avoiding the broken bit. I need to know if one: how long a rebuild is going to take, so I can plan the downtime and two: will it complete sucessfully or will the world fall on my head.
LVM snapshots can help here and my filesystem in on a LVM logical volume. The idea is to take a snapshot of the filesystem and run the rebuild on the snapshot. Then you can decide whether you want to take the live filesystem down to rebuild that, or maybe you decide to update your backups best you can and start a new filesystem from scratch.
Sun’s ZFS on Linux via FUSE
Ricardo Correia has been porting Sun’s recently GPLed ZFS to Linux using FUSE. I’ve been playing with it and I’m quite impressed. The FUSE port is alpha quality, so isn’t to be trusted with important data yet – but it’s fun to play with.
ZFS merges the concept of a volume manager and a filesystem. It’s a bit like LVM, with zpools being volume groups and zfs being formatted logical volumes. Zfs “partitions” can change size at any time in any way. It’s also hierarchical, so zfs partitions can have child partitions inheriting their attributes. It also does away with fstab – all mount points are specified as zfs attributes and are automatically mounted when a zpool is brought online.
Encrypted partitions with Ubuntu/Debian
I figured out how to set up an encrypted partition on Ubuntu the other day. There are a bunch of ways of doing it but I found this to be the simplest. It should work on Debian too, since all the relevant packages are Debian ones anyway. In my example I’m encrypting an LVM partition (logical volume), but it should work with any device, including removable USB keys (see end notes). UPDATE: This is broken in Edgy but I figured out a simple fix, see below.