Adding Disks via LVM

In my last post, I mentioned that I like to use a 4GB disk for my root volume on any Linux VM's... this is mainly for local / dev environments, where you want to cram as many VM's as possible into a small space. But sometimes you need more space, in which case you can add another disk. This isn't as straight forward with lvm as it is without, so here's a nice easy step by step to help you get there after you have added a new disk to the VM. In this case, we are adding a new 2GB disk that will be configured as a new logical volume (you could of course just add to an existing volume if you wanted). We'll then format it with ext3 and mount it at /usr/local/pgsql/data.

Minimal RHEL 5.5 / CentOS 5.5 Install

After messing around with Ubuntu for a while, I decided it would be a little more portable for me to use a Red Hat based distro as my primary Linux environment. My distro of choice is actually Scientific Linux, which is developed / maintained by CERN. Why not CentOS? Frankly, Scientific Linux doesn't have any of the bullshit that CentOS does, and is for all intents and purposes identical.

Oddly enough, there is no "JeOS" option for RHEL based distro's like there is for Ubuntu. Amazon recently launched their own RHEL derivative which I thought might give me some clues as to how minimal a RHEL based distro could be, however a quick yum list installed proved it to be far from minimal - disk is cheaper than the combination of network and CPU it seems, so they cram many development packages into the base image (OpenJDK, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, X etc). Which is not really a huge deal to be honest, but I like to keep things as small as possible without getting ridiculous.

I'm Baaaaaack!

Heheh. Well after a few years of dedicated hosting, it was clear that I didn't need it. So here I am back at Blogger, hopefully to stay this time :)