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.