Currently having a couple of issues with laptop and server.   Hmm.. sratching head, thinking cap on, etc..

Problem 1 – laptop swap
On my laptop, I recently resized my root partition (lv) and removed/recreated my swap partition (also a logical volume).  On my new swap, I used mkswap, added an entry in fstab and turned it on.  All rudimentary stuff. 

But when the system came to using it, it hung.  No response in X whatsoever, although there seemed to be disk polling going on, suggesting the kernel was still operational.  I couldn’t flip to another console or SSH in to find out, though.

I created a new partition directly on the disk, not using LVM, and made that a swap too. Same set up procedure as before, then activated it.  This time, when the system needed to swap, it did – as you would expect it to.  Bizarre.  I can’t think why this might be happening, apart from something going wrong through the device mapper, maybe.

Problem 2 – server dump
The second problem I’m having is backing up the server using dump.  In short, when I dumped out a level 0 backup, not all my files were copied.  Strangely, also, directory sizes on the tape, and when restored, seemed padded/boundary-aligned – e.g. 4kb, 8kb or 16kb.  I’m trying to solve this one too, and am using tar in the meantime (which, if testing proves positive, may stick with).