Matthew Steven's Thought Box

This week Google was forced to hand over their logs of all visitors who have ever watched a video on Youtube. Big Media are hunting for even more ways to sue their customers it appears.

Hey webmasters: Never log your visitors if you want to keep running a successful controversial website. Then there’s nothing to submit when the subpoena comes.

Why did they do it then? Simple, greed got them. The user traffic patterns of all those IP addresses on You-Tube are worth a lot of money, and the logs make that total information awareness possible.

Google may have their cake, but Viacom et al are going to eat it too.

May the lawyers enjoy their yachting as they always do. In the end we’ll have one less fair use right.

Have you contributed to protecting your freedom lately?

Here’s one for the hall of fame of terrible error messages.

When trying to add a mirror to a LVM volume on a linux box, you get this message:

#lvconvert -m 1 disks/root /dev/sdb2

Not enough PVs with free space available for parallel allocation.
Consider --alloc anywhere if desperate.

This message is completely useless, we have TONS of free extents on both disks. So we check for help

# lvconvert
Exactly one of --mirrors or --snapshot arguments required.
lvconvert: Change logical volume layout

lvconvert [-m|--mirrors Mirrors [--corelog]]
[-R|--regionsize MirrorLogRegionSize]
[--alloc AllocationPolicy]
[-d|--debug]
[-h|-?|--help]
[-v|--verbose]
[--version]
LogicalVolume[Path] [PhysicalVolume[Path]...]

Yea. Not much there we can work with. So after hitting (1) forehead and (2) Google, we discover in an obscure blog reply that we need to specify where the mirror log goes for this.

Well it would have been nice to have that in the “help” message, or the HOWTO, or the Guide and probably in the error message as well now wouldn’t it.

So for you seekers out there, here is what you need to do:

lvconvert -m 1 disks/root /dev/sda2 --corelog

Logical volume root converted.

Yes, just adding –corelog will do the job.

If you’re creating a new volume and you get this error, try tacking –corelog on the end of that command as well.

Doesn’t look like LVM folks accept bug reports either, maybe you can pass the word along?