Re: preseed software raid, one device with many partitions?

[Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@debian.org>]

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 09:21:29PM +0000, Ryan Braun [ADS] wrote:
> On October 28, 2010 09:02:02 pm Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 08:42:11PM +0000, Ryan Braun [ADS] wrote:
> > > Looking over the preseed docs for setting up software raid,  it looks
> > > like you need to create a separate raid device for each partition?  I'm a
> > > software raid newb,  and I've only set it up a couple times going through
> > > d-i manually.
> > >
> > > What I'm looking to do is create one raid device containing all of sda
> > > and sdb.  Then partition that device up into /boot,/,/home etc.  From the
> > > preseed docs,  it looks like they cut up the disks so each partition is
> > > its own raid device.
> > >
> > > Am I reading the docs wrong?
> > >
> > > http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/apbs04.html.en
> > >
> > > FWIW OS is lenny.
> >
> > You could use LVM instead of partitions to split the raid.  It is a lot
> > more flexible than partitions.
> >
> > So if you create one partition per drive and make the raid on that
> > and then setup LVM on the raid device and create logical volumes for
> > everything on the LVM you should have a great setup.
> >
> > Now you might have to keep either / or /boot outside LVM.  Not sure what
> > the state of grub support is for that.  I currently have my setup so that
> > / is a seperate raid from the raid device LVM uses for everything else.
> 
> I would love to,  but from my googling it sounds like preseeding software raid 
> + LVM is a black art of some sorts.  Lots of chatter on google,  but not much 
> solid info.  If anyone has any examples of this,  I'd love to see them.

Unfortunately, I can't give you any help with preseeding software RAID and
LVM.  However, I guess this is as good a time as any to introduce to the
world my "automated partitioner of last resort", which I've named
scripted-partitioning.  It's rough at the moment (and heavily skewed towards
the internal uses that I've been putting it to, but if you can't make the
existing tools do what you want, perhaps it can help?

README and package at http://hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/scripted-partitioning/. 

- Matt