sandoz's questions

I am wondering what the advantages and disadvantages of the following two scenarios are.

• LVM physical volume directly on SAN volume
  pvcreate /dev/sda

• LVM physical volume on a single partition, which is spanning the whole SAN volume
  parted /dev/sda -s -- mklabel gpt mkpart primary 0 -1
pvcreate /dev/sda1

I read in the LVM-Manual, that PV on the whole disk is not recommended because of management issues with other OSes that don't understand LVM-labels. But I am not sure, whether this really applies to SAN volumes in practice.

Furthermore I think partitioning adds another layer with possible problems, like device name changes of mapped devices on the partition device.

What is better practice?

If I have multiple network interfaces (here: 2) on a Linux machine (here: Debian Lenny). How do I see, over what network interface (NIC) a route to a specific destination host is going and what source IP address is used by default?

I have though of using

ping -I nic1 desthost.example.com
ping -I nic2 desthost.example.com

too see if both ways are possible. (Here: Both ways are possible)

I looked up the routing table

ip route show

But it's quite complex, so I thought, there must by a small simple tool, to just tell me:

"To destination host desthost.example.com it takes interface nicX and source IP address 10.0.0.1"

What is the simplest way of getting this information?

(And I'd rather not use tcpdump and set the interfaces in promiscous mode.)

Thanks.