This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: Software RAID From: Eric Sisler <esisler@westminster.lib.co.us> Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 10:42:32 -0600 Kevin Diffily <kdiffily@webpageweaver.com> wrote: >I am trying to set up Software Raid on a 6.0 (soon to be 6.1) system >and have read a lot of the how to documents. I am still undecided as >to the best way to proceed and am wondering if anyone would be >willing to share their experiences with this. > >I would prefer to set up a Single Raid 0 Array and mount it as the >Root Device (optimal) or a /boot device and the rest of the >filesystem on a RAID Array. I'm wondering why you want a single RAID 0 array, unless you have several small disks you want to concatenate into one. RAID 0 gives you no redundancy whatsoever, it's just a way to have several small disks appear as one larger one. >The docs seem to indicate that mounting >the root filesystem is a tricky thing to pull off. I came to that conclusion as well and decided to go a bit simpler. While I will be mirroring my user data disk with RAID 1 after I upgrade to RH 6.1, I decided against making the boot disk RAID for now. What I'm doing currently is using rsync to create a "cold" copy of the boot disk. rsync is great for this as it only copies changed files and keeps owner/group/permissions, etc. I have it scheduled to run from cron every 6 hours. In the event of a boot disk failure, I shut the box down, swap the primary/secondary boot disks and power the server back on. (I have easily accessable drives in the server.) Because of the way I have my filesystems configured, data on the boot disk doesn't change much and worse case I'd be missing 6 hours of data. (Mostly logfiles.) >I also am unsure >how to convert my single disk to a dual disk array without losing all >of the data. It seems as if I would need another drive to manipulate >the Raid commands from and to copy the original data to while setting >up the array. I'm not sure there is one. You'd either need to move the data to another disk or tape drive and move it back when you're done. Another reason I chose not to make the boot disk RAID. It's easy enough to backup user data to tape, wipe the drive(s), create the RAID array and restore from tape, but a little tricker to do so with the boot disk. ===