On 03/02/2014 10:55 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Mar 2, 2014, at 9:35 PM, Nathanael Noblet
<nathanael(a)gnat.ca> wrote:
> On 03/01/2014 04:57 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>> The servers were rented with a Fedora produced default/automatic/guided
partitioning layout? If not, your example is out of scope. We are only talking about this
context specifically, not arbitrary examples for shrinking a file system. The Fedora
automatic/guided partition layout is a rootfs of 50GB, and any significant additional
space goes to a separate /home. So you're saying you'd shrink a 50GB rootfs for
encrypted data, rather than blow away the /home LV, make a new LV, encrypt it, then format
it?
> They were CentOS 6 machines. So perhaps the defaults are different however this is
something that happened to me and not being able to shrink a fs would have been
problematic / costly for me. Granted the default there was /boot / and swap so I had a
900G / and nothing else thus the shrinking of the / fs. So I suppose that if the servers
were fedora and had a /home LV this particular situation wouldn't have been an issue.
>
> I just wanted to point out that shrinking a partition is a valid use case is all. In
our current default fedora layout I could still accomplish what I needed. But shrinking a
fs is a valid use case…
Fair enough, and I'm not suggesting shrink is invalid for that matter. I merely want
to understand the actual requirement because there may be better ways to address it.
> Given the XFS shrinking issue it might even be nice to not allocate ALL storage,
create /, swap and /home without taking up all storage and then let people enlarge what
they need…
It's an interesting suggestion. But does this really apply to the target audience of
users who are a.) using a GUI installer, and b.) choosing to use an automatic/guided
partitioning layout? Is that sort of user likely to jump into a resize operation from the
command line post-install? Why wouldn't they just use Manual Partitioning?
What you suggest might seem plausible for Server. But I don't think that's a good
idea for Workstation, to burden the user with an incomplete partition layout that
(silently) proposes they complete or customize it post-install.
Yeah, sorry my suggestion wasn't a blanket statement - in fact I wasn't
even thinking in terms of Server vs Workstations. For *sure* for the
Workstation product where one is using the GUI and accepting defaults
using all available space makes sense. Again I wasn't even thinking of
that. Just that some defaults have implications especially if I'm not
the one doing the install. If some datacenter just fires off an install
or uses some image from the default server install I'm in the same
unshrinkable fs boat regardless of how I would have done the install
myself. Sometimes we assume the defaults are used by 'naive' users using
a GUI where they could just as easily be used by massive organizations
with thousands of servers with highly trained staff because well it
doesn't matter to them. default is default...
--
Nathanael