Ubuntu 10.10->11.04 encrypted LVM fail, rebuilding initramfs, rdinit

One of my workstations was an Ubuntu 10.10 on an encrypted LVM. I decided to upgrade to 11.04 and was unable to boot, falling back to initramfs busybox shell.

If you are not familiar with this kind of setup, it basically works with:

• a non-encrypted /boot with kernel and initramfs
• initramfs contains required modules (aes, lvm, etc.) and a few scripts to mount the filesystem: in this case, a script to ask for the password, decrypt the LVM and mount the root filesystem

Reducing the number of devices in a RAID-5

(This blog entry has already been published in French on Nibbles' microblog)

Since 2006, linux RAID allows to grow a RAID-5 volume by adding new devices, and thus allowing to grow the filesystem underneath in order to have more free space. The opposite operation was missing, that is shrinking a RAID-5 volume by removing devices, assuming the underneath filesystem has already been reduced (otherwise data would be lost).
This summer, Neil Brown developed this feature among others, as he announced on his blog.