[oclug] LVM snapshot causing desktop to become covered in hidden volume icons

[Andy Civil]

This is a friend in a development scenario. She can log in to two servers, one 
runs Fedora, which uses LVM. Her home directory is on a third server. She's 
using VNC.

With the Fedora server, her desktop is covered in grey disk drive icons with 
names such as .gconf .mozilla etc.

The first unwanted icon is .snapshot. It contains directories such as hourly.0 
hourly.1 hourle.2 nightly.0 and weekly.0. The whole desktop is covered with 
these icons, e.g. there are three called .gconf. The directory 'hourly.0' 
contains in total 130,000+ files, amounting to many gigabytes.

I believe that this is caused by the 'snapshot' feature of the Logical Volume 
Manager that Fedora uses. The other server (not Fedora) does not have this 
problem despite that the Desktop contains the same files otherwise. I am trying 
to get these unwanted icons off the desktop, even if the solution is to turn off 
the snapshot feature.

The icons have the option "unmount volume" but it doesn't work.

I tried to access the Logical Volume Manager GUI, but it requires root password 
that we don't have.

I tried to sudo the system-config-lvm but it complains that the "DISPLAY" 
variable is not set. We know VNC is using display :2. Do I use the command line 
option "-display" to get this to start in vncserver?

If anyone can offer any insight into the appearance of these icons (hidden 
volumes) I'd appreciate it. I think if I started reading about how LVM worked, 
I'd probably figure it out eventually, but I'd probably learn a whole lot of 
stuff I don't need as well.

Thanks!

-- 
Andy