For for the first time since potato, I reinstalled Debian from scratch on my main box. Hoorah for dist-upgrade! One experience I took away from the installation is how impressed I was with partman, the debian-installer partition management tool. This was my first time using SATA, LVM, and RAID -- I figured I'd play with all the new buzzwords while I had the opportunity -- and partman made it all quite simple!
Once I had my system up and running, I decided to go back and tweak a couple things in the partitioning / LVM / RAID scheme. After looking for a bit, I didn't find a utility [1] quite as good as partman for this task, so I fell back to the command line utilities fdisk, lvm, and mdadm. My sense of it is that there isn't a tool packaged in Debian to fill this need -- although feel free to give suggestions at this point. I suggest one of two things, or if there's time both! 1. Port partman from debian-installer to make it a full fledged utility. 2. Port whatever tool Red Hat uses [2] for this same task and package it for Debian. I haven't used the latter, so the former would be my preference. Can someone more familiar with partman and debian-installer give an indication of how much work this would be? Cheers! Shaun [1] qtparted is a nice tool, but doesn't handle LVM or RAID yet as far as I know. webmin-lvm is a capable looking tool though. [2] I think this tool might be called DiskDruid, but I'm quite out of touch with Red Hat state-of-the-art.