Add 14 New Missions on Filesystems & LVM with a whole new (and hopefully funny) lore

[OsaAjani]

📚 Summary

This pull request introduces 14 new missions dedicated to learning filesystems and LVM (Logical Volume Management) concepts.
Each mission focuses on a specific operation or principle, with progressively increasing technical depth.

🗺️ Lore

These missions are framed within a light narrative inspired by Terry Pratchett’s humor and Courteline’s satirical bureaucracy in Messieurs les ronds-de-cuir.
The learner is placed in a world where system administration, and especially volume management, is interpreted as the discovery and management of new lands—every technical task becomes a bureaucratic expedition.

The exaggerated administration oversees every action through forms, seals, and contradictory procedures.
This comedic framing is designed to make the missions memorable while keeping the exercises fully technical and precise.

📘 Story Resume

The overarching story of LVM — L’histoire Véritable (et tamponnée) follows the rise of the Great Secretariat of Territorial Volumes, an absurdly hierarchical institution tasked with discovering, annexing, organizing, resizing, and occasionally repairing newly found “territories” (physical volumes, volume groups, logical volumes, filesystems, etc.).

• Physical Volumes are unexplored lands suddenly discovered by the Ministry of Cartographic Improvisation.
• Volume Groups are administrative regions created after interminable committees vote on border definitions, stamps, and sub-stamps.
• Logical Volumes are districts drawn, redrawn, extended, or reduced based on shifting political priorities and poorly written decrees.
• Filesystems represent the infrastructure of these territories—roads, towns, archives—whose integrity must occasionally be inspected or repaired following “unfortunate clerical incidents.”
• Snapshots are official “Historical Instant Decrees” allowing the Secretariat to revert to a prior state after inevitable large-scale mistakes.
• Data migration is treated as a grand relocation of populations ordered by the central administration.
• Quotas are systems of obscure fiscal obligations applied to citizens for reasons even the Secretariat can't fully justify.

Throughout the missions, the learner plays the role of a junior clerk or engineer navigating this contradictory administration, applying real technical operations while humorously confronting paperwork, pompous officials, and unclear directives.

The story serves as a thematic background: engaging but lightweight, always secondary to the clarity and accuracy of the technical content.

🎯 Objectives

• Provide a structured learning path for core LVM concepts: PVs, VGs, LVs, resizing, snapshots, and associated filesystem operations.
• Offer hands-on exercises guiding learners through practical system administration tasks.
• Expand the mission catalog with a cohesive set of filesystem-focused challenges.

🛠️ What’s Included

• 14 new missions, each with:
  • A clear learning goal
  • Commands and expected outcomes
  • An auto.sh script to automatically test the mission

📦 Topics Covered

The missions collectively address the following core concepts:

• Physical Volumes (PV) — create, display, scan, and remove physical volumes
• Volume Groups (VG) — create, manage, extend, reduce, export, and import volume groups
• Logical Volumes (LV) — create, display, scan, remove, and resize logical volumes
• Filesystems — format volumes with ext4, inspect filesystem properties
• Mounting — mount/unmount filesystems, configure persistent mounts in /etc/fstab
• Volume Resizing — extend logical volumes and resize filesystems online
• Snapshots — create point-in-time copies for backup or rollback
• Data Migration — move data across physical volumes within a volume group
• Quotas — enable, configure, and monitor user disk quotas
• Filesystem Integrity — check and repair filesystems using fsck
• Snapshot Merging — restore volumes to a previous snapshot state
• Volume Group Portability — export/import volume groups for system migration

🧪 Testing & Verification

• Each mission includes an auto.sh testing script to simplify validation.
• Missions were tested in a classroom setting with ~15 students on Ubuntu, and generally behaved as expected.
• Improvements were made following classroom feedback to increase consistency and reliability.

⚠️ Notes on Potential Risks

No breaking changes to the project’s core logic.
However, filesystem and LVM operations introduce two practical challenges:

1. They often require root permissions.
2. They can be difficult to reproduce safely and consistently.

To mitigate this:

• A new gsh sudo command is introduced for controlled privilege escalation.
• Missions prefer loopback-based fake volumes (losetup) to avoid manipulating real disks.
• Cleanup steps attempt to remove loop devices and temporary artifacts whenever possible.

[phyver]

Sorry for the delay, I still haven't had time to have a look at your PR.
I'll try to do that in the near future...

Considering the scope of GameShell, I doubt I'll merge missions requiring root access or dealing with LVM filesystems into the "standard" gameshell archive.

Also, there is something very wrong with your repo: most commits have been duplicated, starting with af3ecf1 and 0063b3c, and going back to commits that are almost 5 years old...

[OsaAjani]

Hi phyver, no worries for the delay, I know what it takes to maintain any open source project. I think indeed this should not be part of the standard missions and more something for additional missions like the missions about processes. For the bad commit history tell me what can I do to make it better. For the question of the sudo commands it gets more complicated. We do need root rights to use basically any lvm command. I see only one alternative, removing the global sudo alias and defining new aliases for any required lvm related command. I absolutely get that lvm and filesystems in general are out of the original scope of bash learning, but I feel like this tool is a good fit for teaching students about the core principles behind filesystems and globally many unix systems principles. Le 28 février 2026 13:49:43 GMT+01:00, Pierre Hyvernat ***@***.***> a écrit :

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phyver left a comment (phyver/GameShell#179) Sorry for the delay, I still haven't had time to have a look at your PR. I'll try to do that in the near future... Considering the scope of GameShell, I doubt I'll merge missions requiring root access or dealing with LVM filesystems into the "standard" gameshell archive. Also, there is something very wrong with your repo: most commits have been duplicated, starting with af3ecf1 and 0063b3c, and going back to commits that are almost 5 years old... -- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #179 (comment) You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Message ID: ***@***.***>

[phyver]

For the bad commit history tell me what can I do to make it better.

I'm not sure what could have caused that. You can try pulling the current master branch before committing your changes from scratch.