Raid 1 + lilo

["I. Forbes" <iforbes@zsd.co.za>]

Hello All

As a follow-up to the "closest to debian" thread.

I am using software raid 1, + IDE drives.

On  a woody system with the latest lilo and a new bios it seems 
pretty good.  The bios will boot off the 2nd drive if the first one fails. 
Both disks have an MBR and lilo is on both disks via a mirrored 
/boot partition.  

I think this is pretty bullet proof and it handled everything I could 
simulate but I have not tried shooting out one of the drives!

Now I am looking for 2 things:

1)  has anybody got a 'deb' of the latest lilo, back-ported onto
    potato.  I am looking for one to use on my "stable" machines? 

2)  has anybody written a nifty script which can be run by crond to
    read /proc/mdstat and send off e-mail if something is not
    healthy.  I know this can't be too tricky, but any contributions
    to save "re-inventing" the wheel would be appreciated. 


Also on my wish list is a more advanced script which is run on boot-
up which:

-   detects that one drive in the raid1 is not synced - and is
    presumably a new disk which has just been installed to replace a
    dead one. 

-   reads /etc/raidtab, the partition table on both disks and
    probably a dedicated configuration file. 

-   partitions the 'new' disk if required. 

-   hot syncs the new partition(s) into the raid device(s). 

-   runs 'mkswap' and 'swapon' to set up swap partitions on the new
    drive. 

-   runs install-mbr and lilo to make the new disk bootable. 

This should all be done vary carefully with lots of checks so as not to 
wipe valid data!  Maybe the script should be run manually with 
warning prompts.  

Thanks

Ian

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Ian Forbes ZSD
http://www.zsd.co.za
Office: +27 21 683-1388  Fax: +27 21 674-1106
Snail Mail: P.O. Box 46827, Glosderry, 7702, South Africa
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