Re: 2 issues Raid, Netatalk
Hi all,
Gary Sardine has been most helpful with the RAID
issue. When I replied to him after his first post, I
forgot to say reply all and the subsequent
conversation has been between him and me. I thought I
would post the information he has shared for
everyone's benefit. I may not get to attempting to set
it up for a couple of weeks. Here are his helpful
notes:
>On Sun, 2002-12-15 at 05:46, David Tisdell wrote:
> Thanks Gary.
No problem.
> Two points of clarification:
> 1) I would go ahead and install and create mount
> points etc on a single drive (or multiple drives if
I
> wanted /home on a separate drive) and then add raid
> support after the fact yes?
Since you are interested in RAID1, this might work,
but
I have never tried it. I do want to mention before I
forget that you really should try to have each drive
on
its own IDE channel for software RAID. With RAID1
it's
not as big a deal as with R0 or R5, though.
I expect it might work to install in a single drive,
duplicate the partition scheme in a second (mirror)
drive, then create /etc/raidtab and use mkraid to make
the RAID1 devices. I don't know.
What I do with Debian is kind of cheating (becaused I
work at a GNU/Linux PC shop, and we have lots of
hardware
at our disposal), but it might give you ideas.
We have an IDE drive that holds a good Debian
installation.
It boots a kernel that will drive any piece of
hardware
we offer. We boot a new system (getting Debian) off
of
this hard drive, hanging the hard drive off of a
Promise
PCI IDE card, so it is out of the way of the real
system
drives. We then partition and format the real system
drives. In the case of a system entirely on RAID1:
o make partition schemes for each of two hard drives
identical (software RAID mirrors partitions, not
drives)
o create entries in /etc/raidtab (using an example
copy
we keep around for reference, changing only things
like
raid-level and device)
o use mkraid to make the /dev/mdN software RAID
devices.
o formate the software RAID devices /dev/mdN:
+ use mkreiserfs /dev/mdN for ReiserFS.
+ use mke2fs /dev/mdN for ext2
+ use mke2fs -j /dev/mdN for ext3
+ use mkfs.xfs /dev/mdN for SGI's XFS file system.
o Mount the new system inside of /mnt. e.g., If / is
RAID1 using /dev/md0 and /home is separate, RAID1
using
/dev/md1, do:
# mount /dev/md0 /mnt
# mkdir /mnt/home
# mount /dev/hd1 /mnt/home
The purpose is to _copy_ the running file system
(off of
our stock Debian drive) into the new devices. We
drop to
run level 1 and use cp with certain flags to do this
properly.
Next, we create directories in /mnt that we will not
cp:
# cd /mnt ; mkdir cdrom floppy proc mnt
o Finally, be sure to be in run level 1 (we do all of
the above
in run level 1), and do:
# cd / ; cp -a dir1 dir2 ... mnt
dir1 dir2 ... ranges over every top level directory
(e.g. usr
home lib ...) except for cdrom floppy proc and mnt,
which we
do _not_ want to cp).
If I did not have a stock Debian hard drive and a PCI
IDE card
available for this, I would switch to a shell early in
a Debian
installation and create software RAID devices by hand,
format
them (mke2fs -j or whatever), and mount them.
Don't forget, you will need software RAID support
available in
the kernel. If you will be booting off of a RAID1
array, it's
easiest to compile RAID1 support in rather than using
a module
(else you'll need to use initrd, which Red Hat sets up
behind
the scenes, and Debian does not).
My Debian PPC system has mac-fdisk and not pfdisk;
mac-fdisk is
a lot like fdisk for i386.
Regards,
Gary.
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