Appendix B. Reporting Errors and Bugs

Just telling us that LVM did not work does not provide us with enough information to help you. We need to know about your setup and the various components of your configuration. The first thing you should do is check the linux-lvm mailing list archives to see if someone else has already reported the same bug. If you do not find a bug report for a problem similar to yours you should collect as much of the following information as possible. The list is grouped into three categories of errors.

• For compilation errors:

  1. Detail the specific version of LVM you have. If you extracted LVM from a tarball give the name of the tar file and list any patches you applied. If you acquired LVM from the Public CVS server, give the date and time you checked it out.

  2. Provide the exact error message. Copy the lines of output before the actual error message as well as the lines after. These lines occasionally give hints as to why the error occurred.

  3. List the steps, in order, that produced the error. Is the error reproducible? If you start from a clean state does the same sequence of steps reproduce the error?

• For LVM errors:

  1. Include all of the information requested in the compilation section.

  2. Attach a short description of your hardware: types of machines and disks, disks interface (SCSI, FC, NBD). Any other tidbits about your hardware you feel is important.

  3. The command lines used with LVM to produce the error.

  4. A log file produced when running the offending commands. Make sure you have the following in your /etc/lvm/lvm.conf file:

     log { file="/tmp/lvm2.log" level=7 activation=1 }

• When LVM trips a panic trap:

  1. Include all of the information requested in two sections above.

  2. Provide the debug dump for the machine. This is best accomplished if you are watching the console output of the computer over a serial link, since you can't very well copy and paste from a panic'd machine, and it is very easy to mistype something if you try to copy the output by hand.

This can be a lot of information. If you end up with more than a couple of files, tar and gzip them into a single archive. Submit a link to where this file can be found to the appropriate mailing list (see Section C.1) along with a short description of the error. If you do not have a public web or ftp site that you can post the information to, you can try to submit the file to the list.