Hey, just look at you! You are really progressing in your journey to
become an accomplished system administrator in Linux.
Look at what we've done within this section.
So we've looked at our advanced file system and disk devices.
And that included LVM, RAID, NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI, so quite a
lot that we were looking at. Now, as far as LVM is concerned,
we started off by looking at our partitioning tool
parted and seeing how we could set flags.
These flags help determine and set documentation in our partition
tables, so we know what our partition is being used for.
With LVMs, we are creating dynamic disks,
disks that can easily be expanded as extra space is required.
That space becomes available by adding in more physical volumes.
Those PVs, or physical volumes, are aggregated by volume groups, and
logical volumes consume space from the volume group.
RAID arrays are giving us redundant array of inexpensive disks,
and usually we're managing this with the multi‑disk
administration tool, mdadm. With mdadm, we can go through and
define the RAID array that we want.
Now that RAID array could just be linear where there's no fault tolerance
at all, but we can also then go through and start setting up striped
array, again, with no fault tolerance, but providing better speed of
access, or then going through and setting up fault tolerance with things
like mirroring or RAID 5 arrays.
RAID, though, is supported within the btrfs file system, and within the
btrfs file system, we can create a RAID array just by formatting our
devices and specifying the level of RAID that we want.
We also looked at file servers.
The NFS or network file server is our traditional UNIX file server, and
it's sharing out then our file systems to Linux systems or through
Windows devices where they have got NFS installed.
If we are sharing out though to Windows devices,
we're normally setting up the Samba server and sharing out through the CIFS
protocol. With iSCSI, we saw then that we could create the iSCSI target to
share out block devices as opposed to sharing out files,
just the raw block device itself. To connect to that, we need an iSCSI
initiator, and the iSCSI initiator then connects to the target and then
consumes the block devices so they show as local block devices.
I do hope you really got a lot out of this and you've gone
through and practiced every demonstration.
But next up, we're going to be taking a look at managing Linux services. I look forward to seeing you in the next clip very soon.