Re: Can the automounting of LVM volumes be dangerous in any way?
Antonio Olivares wrote:
Dear all,
I have a question regarding the automounting of LVM volumes
like it is the default Fedora installation. Is there any
way that it is harmful when done from a linux live cd?
For instance in Slax, Tomas Matejicek, the creator of
slax has been encouraged by me and others to implement it
in Slax. I believe it is an excellent idea. I was
wondering if there are any downnsides to having
this done in this livecd or any livecd for that matter.
Thank you in advance for your input regarding this matter.
Regards,
Antonio
Only if the machine in question is on a SAN (disks are shared between multiple
machines) and you automount LVM's/filesystems that are being actively used by
another machine. And in recovery situations people do use livecd's to
troubleshoot issues on things like this. Though I have previously
informed/documented that any time a reinstall is on a SAN connected machine to
disconnect the SAN just so accidents are less likely to happen. Often the SAN
disks can be seen by all machines on the SAN and the boot up software controls
which machine mounts and takes care of it.
This is generally very very bad and can result in files being lost and
filesystem corruption, I have seen System admin mount SAN disks on more than one
machine and it is very messy.
If you want to setup a way for the livecd to have a writeable filesystem you
might limit it to a specific set of names such as LVM's starting with LIVECD_
or something similar, and then mount them at locations depending on what is
after the _ so LIVECD_home or livecd_home would mount as /home and livecd_data
would mount as /data, you could even do something like this livecd_usr_local
would mount as /usr/local. If there is a limit on the lvm name length change
livecd to lcd. Using a name like that should much decrease the possibility of
accessing something someone else is using.
Roger