You can do root raid NOW...
Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> writes:
> Currently the ReiserFS does not support booting. So if you use ReiserFS (which
> you want to do for a squid cache, for /usr/src, and for anything else that has
> lots of little files) then you must have your hard drive partitioned.
> The released RAID drivers (in 2.2.11) do not have decent support for RAID on
> the root device. Until the kernel drivers matching the raidtools2 package
> become standard (or we start making such kernels standard as Red Hat have done)
> if you want RAID you don't do it on the root file system.
> If you want to use RAID-1 as much as possible (very desirable for servers and
> handy for work-stations) or ReiserFS then you need a small partition with /bin,
> /sbin, /etc, /boot, /dev, /lib and mount-points or sym-links for everything
> else.
I understand why you think in these terms, but there's a much easier
way of doing things that works *NOW*, using the current Debian
install.
Install onto a small (20-64MB) partition. Install Debian on it.
Reboot, set up your RAID devices. Reboot again into single user mode.
Copy the contents of the small partition to the raid device. Change
your configuration so that the small partition will now be /boot.
Modify your /etc/lilo.conf appropriately. Run lilo. Reboot
Sure, you just wasted 15-60MB, but who cares. That's what, $.15 these
days?
I've *done* this, more or less (I had to compile the new raidtools and
patch kernels, etc, this was a year ago), and it works fine. If you
have the option to use a smart boot manager (say, MILO on the alpha,
or maybe GRUB on the i386?), you can keep a cold copy of /boot on the
spare bit of the beginning of your second root disk and get to it
easily.
Mike.
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