RAID

[Cameron Kerr <cameron.kerr@paradise.net.nz>]

Oh what a terrible week I'm having. I have a week left until classes
start, and I've been trying to get a RAID5 array going under Debian for
that whole friggin week! As you could probably appreciate, I'm a bit
stressed about the whole thing.

Basically, the docs seem to contradict one another, and nothing works as
expected.

I tried using RAID5, using a known-good kernel (from the old server,
2.2.19), on Debain Potato. The raid personalities are registered ok, but
thats about all.

mdadd complains about the individual partitions, saying that the device
does not exist (_not_ `no such file or directory', that's simple to fix).

I can do a mkraid -f /etc/raid/raid5.conf successfully, although when I go
to put these entries in /etc/mdtab, the man page says its doesn't support
raid 5!!!. Ok, so I'm not officially confused, and swearing (I've been at
this for quite some time now). I've also tried it using a monolithic
2.4.17 kernel, with no difference.

OK, so raid 5 doesn't want to work, when I reboot Debian (2.2r5 BTW), it
can't mdadd the partitions, so it ckraid's them, every bloody time!

I've partitioned the disks (there are three of them, each disk being a
part of two raid volumes), and set them to raid autodetect (0xfd). It
detects them at boot, but because they haven't been initialised, it won't
add them (mdadd still won't work!)

OK, so I decide that performance isn't really _that_ important, but I do
need the reliability, so I decide to go raid 1 (I also tried raid 0, with
no success) mkraid works ok, but mdadd _still_ doesn't work!

If I can't get it working in the next two days, I'm gonna freak out!

Does some kind soul have a reliable recipe for creating a raid array under
Debian 2.2r5?

I've read the docs in /usr/share/doc/raidtools/ too, btw....and the raid
modules are loaded (raid[015])

Thanks ever so much.... <sigh> I need a gin.

Cameron Kerr
-- 
cameron.kerr@paradise.net.nz
http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/~cameronk/