Has anybody had good luck using FAI where it repartitions on a system that previously contained an lvm setup?

[Thomas Neumann (FAI)]

On Thursday 11 July 2013 18:40:35 Ken Hahn wrote:
> Thanks, indeed that patch fixed the problem and made sense to me.  I am
> still, however, curious if there is indeed any documentation on the
> various pre and post states, just so I can understand what they are
> supposed to mean?  The new vg_enabled_for_destroy_* makes sense to me,
> but I'm curious what the original, vgchange_a_n_VG_* is supposed to mean
> exactly.

Probably the only one who knows that is Michael Tautschnig, but he hasn't 
been seen on this list since April 2011. I have run into these problems and 
tried to dig into setup-storage's code but to be frank it's not exactly the 
prettiest in terms of style and readability. Wasn't to happy with my patch 
since I'm pretty sure preserving partitions is not possible with it:

http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-fai-devel%40uni-koeln.de/msg00712.html

So I started on a different project to create a test harness for testing 
different partition setups in short time. Main usage was intended to check 
if setup-storage is doing the same things after tweaking the code and 
applying bugfixes. (Would be pretty embarassing to get LVM to work but break 
MD- oder crypto-devices.)

https://lists.uni-koeln.de/pipermail/linux-fai/2013-March/010003.html

It works pretty nicely except that you can't verify disk configs using 
/dev/disk/by-path/, by-id/ etc. since the volumes are emulated with loopback 
devices and one would have to do some udev magic to make it work.


Since all my work-related itches are scratched I can only allot my copious 
free time to it. There isn't too much of that at the moment - so I'm 
currently not actively working on finding a solution. [Apart from the free 
time I must confess that I'm actually scared of the perl code inside setup-
storage - on the outside it looks like it's split nicely into different 
libraries but on the inside it's more like it's one big fscking pile with 
usage of package-scoped variables all over the place.] I was kinda hoping 
that Michael would come back sooner or later and would fix this mess himself 
but that does seem less and less probable with each month passing.

tl;dr
 - setup-storage + LVM is broken since 4.something
 - maintainer ('main coder') is not available
 - code is very hard to understand and modify
 - workarounds exist but break other stuff

bye
thomas