Practical Linux System Administration

Chapter 7. Managing Storage

In this chapter, you learn how to add storage to your systems. You’ll see how to add a new disk drive to the system and make it available. You will also explore the logical volume manager and how to manipulate logical volumes, as well as learn about disk formatting, partitioning, and mounting.

In the first section, I cover some general concepts related to disks, filesystems, volumes, partitions, directories, and filesystem mounting.

Administering Linux Storage

The price of disk space has decreased so much in recent years that space is no longer a high-value commodity. You can buy multiterabyte disks for a few dollars per gigabyte. So system administrators rarely have to threaten to implement quotas or other arbitrary limits on disk space. Workstations and laptops often have as much space as servers, so space is no longer at a premium, and managing it is far less of a problem than it was just a few years ago. For example, many sysadmins now bypass old backup methods such as tape for faster and cheaper disk-to-disk backups.

But even though disk space is cheap and available, sysadmins still need to monitor users’ disk usage. You don’t want individuals filling up shared disk spaces or home directories with their music, videos, or other large files, because they waste corporate-owned space and prolong backup times. This section discusses disk-related terminology and how Linux system administrators interpret those terms. The specifics of how to work with ...