Re: Debian installer for Buffalo LS Live (LS-CHL) and Mini (LS-WSGL)

[Benjamin Cama <benoar@free.fr>]

Hi again,

Le dimanche 31 juillet 2011 à 22:54 +0200, Benjamin Cama a écrit :
> Then, there is the fact that I'm still not able to create a RAID1 array
> for /boot that could mimic the behavior of the original /dev/md0, that
> is, that one partition (/dev/sda1) or the other (/dev/sdb1) can be
> mounted as a standalone ext3 fs. I'm not good at all at md stuff, so I
> don't know how realizable this is, but it could be nice to have this
> same setup as the original firmware, as u-boot still handle both devices
> as standalone partitions, and that having the data on both is more
> reliable. (even if the included u-boot doesn't seem to be very happy
> whenever an image is broken; I wasn't even able to TFTP boot my device
> once when I had broken the uImage. I had to remove the drives and put
> back a correct image on the disk…)

One remark about that: we should definitely get that working, as I ran
into an issue upon reboot; for some reason, /dev/sdb1 was not seen as a
good ext3 partition by U-boot for some time, and it didn't bother me. I
somehow fsck'd it, and upon reboot, the bootloader took my shiny new
kernel from sda1 (that I told the installer is for /boot) but with an
old initrd from sdb1. It seems to kind of “load-balance” the loading of
kernel and initrd… (it always at least check both for valid u-boot
images on both drives) Of course, this didn't work. As I'm no good at
fiddling with U-boot, I used d-i to get a shell, mount my partitions and
copy the good kernel+initrd to /dev/sdb1 and all went fine. But this
problem will reappear on the next kernel upgrade. So, I'm interested in
any advices on this md setup. The workaround for now may be to simply
scramble /dev/sdb1 so that U-boot doesn't use it at all.

One more thing, about the drives: by default, their power management is
set to a crazy spin-down time of 5 seconds. I installed hdparm and added
the following to /etc/default/hdparm:

  harddisks="/dev/sda /dev/sdb"
  hdparm_opts="-B254 -S60"
  # we use software raid, so set it
  RAID_WORKAROUND=yes

Which sets the timeout to 5 minutes. Much better.

Regards,
benjamin

PS: Cc me, I'm not subscribed.