Continuing the exploration of my problem...
Quick problem summary: I could not boot past emergency mode because it could not mount /var; which is a separate filesystem than /. My /var filesystem is a LUKS-encrypted logical volume, which happens to be on /dev/dm-11. Although the logical volume itself was present and active (shows up in lvdisplay); the lvm device file was never getting created for it.
When I ran "dmsetup info /dev/dm-11" it failed, saying the device didn't exist! Yet the device file "/dev/dm-11" was present, and clearly was usable as I could manually access the data on it, by a process such as:
ln -s /dev/vg_xyz/lv_var /dev/dm-11
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/vg_xyz/lv_var /dev/mapper/luks-xyz
mount /dev/mapper/luks-xyz /var
So /dev/dm-11 clearly works, yet "dmsetup info" was failing for it!
Since I could manually get /var mounted, and I fortunately had enough free space, I went ahead copied the entire filesystem into /. [Copying details -- I first excluded any security-sensitive files as I was going transfering to a non-encrypted filesystem, and copied the rest of the files while preserving SELinux contexts, and also renaming mountpoints as appropriate so that I ended up with /var on root being an identical copy of what used to be in the separate /var filesystem.]
After removing /var from my fstab, a reboot worked completely. Furthermore, when I look into the /dev/mapper directory or the device directory for the volume group I see ALL the expected device symlinks exist - including my old /var as well as the other missing logical volumes. Also "dmsetup info" now works on all of them.
I am still quite curious as to what was going on, and am wondering if I can go back to using a separate /var logical volume.
Deron
On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 2:50 AM, Deron Meranda <deron.meranda@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Here's some more information. It looks like all the LVM device files that correspond to a device mapper minor number of 10 or greater are missing. I have four such devices (logical volumes).After boot the lvm devices look like,lvhome -> ../dm-9lvroot -> ../dm-1...and so on.All the devices with minor numbers < 10 appear as I expect. However all the those with minor number >= 10 are missing.If I query dm directly (dmsetup ls), or just look for all dm devices (ls /dev/dm-*) then all of the devices show up. It is only the symbolic links for the volume group that are missing.Is there a particular dm bug, or is this just a coincidence? How can I get the system to boot?
Deron Meranda
http://deron.meranda.us/
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