Our-files.com – Nathans' Rants

So I’ve been with Linode.com now for coming up on either 3 or 4 years, I’ve lost track now. I was looking for a remote server that i could play with and run a few services such as mail and maybe a web page or two. So a friend and I bought a linode. Back then the lowest linode you could get was a 32mb linode (32mb of ram), and i think it hat 4gig of HDD space. Not a lot but it was reasonable at 19.95$ a month.

Low and behold 3-4 years later, for the same price linode now offers the Linode 360, with 10Gig of storage off the bat. Every 6 months or so, so far, the team at Linode have managed to excite us all, by giving us free upgrades, the last one 20% ram increase for xmas. Ive been through countless free RAM upgrades, as well as storage, and transfer, and not once has there been a cost associated with it.

The only reason i can say that my uptime is not massively large, is that they keep giving out these upgrades that require us to reboot to take advantage of them. Otherwise i havnt had a much of a problem or downtime, that i havn’t caused myself, or was outside of Linode’s reachs (Datacentre issues).

Thats not to mention the friendliness and helpfulness of the 3 admins, Caker, Tasaro, and Mikegrb who are always available via the ticketing system, and atleast one is generally lurking in the irc channel (#linode on irc.oftc.net). On top of the help from the staff, there are always people arround in the chat channel that are more then willing to help out on just about any linux topic, linode related, or not. That and the forums are always bristling with activity, be it howto guides, customer feedback, announcements or community help requests with specific platform/software packages.

These days i have 3 linodes, 2x 360mb, and a 540mb one, ive never looked back…

With servers in 3 different data centres, full root access, friendly staff and a great community behind them, if your looking for a VPS, you can stop looking. Linode is the place to be.

www.linode.com Got root?

Well i got a few more drives today for my file server, and one of the things i couldnt remember was how to add to the LVM device that exists that stores all my loot.

First off there is
pvdisplay which shows you which physical drives are alocated to what volume group
lvdisplay which gives you details about the actually logical volume, such as its status etc.

Now the part that initially tripped me up was forgetting to create the partition to LVM type on the raid
pvcreate /path/to/device
It’ll show up something like this

pvcreate /dev/md3
Physical volume “/dev/md3” successfully created

Next step is to add it to the existing group
vgextend /path/to/device

channel:/etc/lvm# vgextend vg00 /dev/md3
Volume group “vg00” successfully extended

Now that its in the volume group and its extended that group to incorporate all the devices, you need to extend the logical volume.
lvextend -l +536551 /dev/vg00/lv_space
Where 536551 is the extents listed as free as shwon by pvdisplay

Now that that is done, its just a matter of extending the file system..