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Re: No swap on my Debian Sid system



On Monday 23 Jan 2006 10:37, Gilles wrote:
> The idea is that if one disk fails, and the swap on that one is corrupted,
> the system will crash...

And that is *good* -- a crashed system has to be dealt with there and then, 
and is not going to keep limping along, possibly making matters slowly worse 
and worse; as I have seen happen in practice with old, legacy systems.  After 
all, if your swap partition is corrupt, how do you know it's the only thing?

While I think it's generally good to keep a server up as long as possible, I 
also believe there are times when it needs to come down for damage 
limitation.

> > With the kind of hardware RAID that appears as a single
> > SCSI drive, you obviously can't avoid RAIDing swap; but at least it isn't
> > such a performance hit.
> Some people have pointed out that linux's software RAID is probably more
> efficient then the common cheap (fake) hardware RAID.

Indeed; but I was talking about expensive, true hardware RAID.  If your "RAID 
controller" is not really a RAID controller, then by all means use md.  

> On my system (using "mdadm"):
>
> # ls /etc/raidtab
> ls: /etc/raidtab: No such file or directory

The configuration file might well have moved since I last set up an md RAID 
system .....  that's the thing to beware of with any reliable system; the 
construction often outlasts the design.  As always, check your own setup and 
make appropriate substitutions.

-- 
AJS
delta echo bravo six four at earthshod dot co dot uk



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