Re: linux software RAID with hot-swap hardware
:-> "Russell" == Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> writes:
Hi
> I've written a document on using Linux software RAID with hot-swap SCSI
> hardware.
nice doc, just a little comment about booting:
> *Booting*
> To make a RAID-1 device bootable you first have to use fdisk to
> set the bootable flag on both the partitions for the root file
> system (if one disk is removed you want
> the other disk to be bootable).
...make this in bold, I was bitten by it :)
Also, and this is probably specific to my hardware (compaq ml530,
which has 2 scsi hosts), to boot from the right-side disks you have to
tell the bios to use the second scsi host. Quite annoying.
> Then you have to to configure LILO with the root=/dev/md1 and
> boot=/dev/md1 lines to configure the root file system as the
> boot device (NB if you use a RAID device
> other than /dev/md1 for the root file system then adjust the
> LILO configuration accordingly. The LILO configuration is in
> /etc/lilo.conf, to apply the changes run the
> lilo command with no parameters.
> Finally you have to use the install-mbr command to set up a boot
> block that the BIOS can run to load the LILO block, use the
> following commands:
> install-mbr /dev/sda
> install-mbr /dev/sdb
> This installs the Debian MBR on both hard drives so that
> whichever drive is removed the other has a boot loader that can
> then load LILO to boot Linux.
Instead of install-mbr, I used the following line in lilo.conf:
raid-extra-boot="/dev/sda,/dev/sdb"
According to the documentation of lilo, this shouldn't be necessary,
but apparently either the funcionality or the docs are buggy. Without
that line I couldn't boot at all from the second disk, or from any
disk that weren't formatted during the initial installation process
(note that after installing the first machine, I just replicated the
others by swapping the disks around and having raid regenerate the
arrays)
Hope this is useful for you
Pf
--
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Pierfrancesco Caci | ik5pvx | mailto:p.caci@tin.it - http://gusp.dyndns.org
Firenze - Italia | Office for the Complication of Otherwise Simple Affairs
Linux penny 2.4.20-ac2 #1 Fri Jan 17 18:10:25 CET 2003 i686 GNU/Linux
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