Software raid on alpha: success story
Hello.
Once upon a time I decided to reinstall debian on my alpha and I
thought, since I have two equal disks, it is a good idea to have a
soft raid1 on them. But before I started I had searched the web a bit
and found the following dissapointing message from Craig Small:
CS> Subject: [OT] / on soft-raid1, disk labels
CS> On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 04:25:35PM +0200, Norbert Preining wrote:
CS> On Mit, 22 Sep 2004, Adrian Zaugg wrote:
CS> > have to setup a boot partition, which is not on the raid and has bsd
CS> > disklabels, and a root partition, which is on the raid and has pc-style
CS> > disklabels (type fd). If I remember right, you cannot mix pc-style and bsd
CS> > disklabels on one physical disk, so you need to have a separate physical
CS> > bootdisk. Apart from that, it's the same as on a i386.
CS>
CS> Grmmm, well, complicated. Anyway, I will have to go for this, if nobody
CS> else can contribute genius ideas.
CS> I gave up. I can tell you that I tried all sorts of strange things
CS> and could not get RAID 1 working reliably on a disk with BSD disklabels.
CS> Sometimes it died with mkraid, sometimes the mkfs, sometimes when it
CS> should restart on reboot. The only consistent thing was it died
CS> somewhere along the line.
CS> - Craig
CS> --
CS> Craig Small GnuPG:1C1B D893 1418 2AF4 45EE 95CB C76C E5AC 12CA DFA5
CS> Eye-Net Consulting http://www.enc.com.au/ MIEE Debian developer
CS> csmall at : enc.com.au ieee.org debian.org
I read it, became glooby, but made up my mind to try. And it
works. Four months without any trouble.
Here are my notes on the process:
mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sd[ab]2
mkfs.ext2 /dev/md0
mount /dev/md0 /mnt/tmp
/usr/sbin/debootstrap --arch alpha sarge /mnt/tmp http://ftp.fi.debian.org/debian
apt-get install aboot
swriteboot /dev/sda /boot/bootlx
swriteboot /dev/sdb /boot/bootlx
abootconf /dev/sda 2
abootconf /dev/sdb 2
apt-get install mdadm kernel-image-2.4.27-1-generic
0:2/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.27-1-generic initrd=/boot/initrd.img-2.4.27-1-generic ro root=/dev/md0
>>>boot dka0 -flags 0
PS One bad thing: I have failed to create ext3 on my raid. Do not
remember details, but I got rotten results, when I tried.
--
Alexander Kotelnikov
Saint-Petersburg, Russia
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