Adding disks to an LVM

One of my virtual machines ran out of disk space the other day because I wasn't sure of disk sizing when I initially started playing with it. The solution was simple the LVM had to be extended. This is how you do it:

1. sudo apt-get install system-config-lvm
2. sudo pvcreate /dev/your_disk
3. sudo vgextend VG_Name /dev/your_disk
4. sudo lvextend -1 +100%FREE LV_PATH 
5. sudo resize2fs LV_PATH
6. sudo init 6

That is it, simple right?

To determine the disk(s) you want to add you do ls /dev/sd* it will return your disks, you will probably want to add the disks with no numbers at the end.

To figure out your volume group (VG_NAME) you do sudo vgdisplay and to figure out the logical volume path (LV_PATH) you do sudo lvdisplay.

Virtualbox guest additions on ubuntu

When I want to try something out I often use a virtualbox to play in. My guest operating system is often an Ubuntu. One of the things you want to do is share a folder with the guest operating system and thus you need to install the virtualbox guest additions.

Where in the past I use to work with the additions CD-rom, I now use the package that Ubuntu offers called virtualbox-guest-additions-iso. It is important to be aware about the fact that Ubuntu has split things up a bit and thus you have other packages to install too if you need some functionalities like vitualbox-guest-dkms, virtualbox-guest-x11 and virtualbox-guest-utils.

These virtualbox-guest packages are DKMS aware, which means that they can update without changing the whole kernel.

A common operation is to share a directory with the virtual machine. You do this by setting up a directory and permanently mounting it. It will be mounted in /media.