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Careful what you call your server!

John Ferlito · 1 March 2010 · 3 Comments

I was setting up a server recently and I was using KVM to virtualise a whole lot of hosts. Being fairly unimaginative I decided to call the machine kvm. As usual I used LVM for the disks. Now on Ubuntu this means that by default the VG will be called the same as the host name. This means the root LV will appear on the system as /dev/kvm/root.

When they KVM modules are loaded, they try and create a device called /dev/kvm. This fails pretty miserably since /dev/kvm is already a directory due to LVM shenanigans.

Not all is lost though if you’ve done a lot of setup like I had. You can rename VGs. Simply boot from your Ubuntu install CD, choose rescue mode and then jump into a shell. First you deactivate the LVs using

Bash
vgchange -a n

then you can rename the VG using

Bash
vgrename kvm kvmvg

Not sure whether I should file this problem as a bug. It is a bit of a weird situation.

Sysadmin kvm, lvm, ubuntu, virtialisation

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Robert Collins says

    1 March 2010 at 11:14 am

    Doctor it hurts when I put my finger in my eye.

    Reply
    • johnf says

      1 March 2010 at 12:14 pm

      @Robert Collins
      I disagree. My choice of a perfectly valid machine name shouldn’t break my system because udev chooses to just litter the /dev/ namespace when perfectly good device names already exist in /dev/mapper.

      Reply
  2. :-) says

    27 April 2010 at 6:39 pm

    http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html 🙂

    Reply

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