RAID Root Installation
Ok,
I'm spent;
I have 4 disks in a raid 5 setup. This takes less than 2 minutes in redhat,
mabye 3 minutes in Suse's Yast.
I'd like to use debian due to it's Inherent pro-community and development
stances. But seriously, it's like pulling teeth from a wild boar.
Here's the deal, I've built an inexpensive near-line soft raid setup consisting
of 4 80GB WD drives and 2 Promise ATA133 controllers (PDC2096's).
Now potato puked without the drivers for the Promise contollers which kernel
modules were NO WHERE to be found, so I grabbed the unstable version.
So now it boots and detects all the hardware just fine, I installed the base
sytsem on the first drive. However THERE IS NO DOCUMENTATION on this topic.
So I'm creating it.
So
I've pieced together the following
1. Install system (Single Drive)
2. Re-compile kernel with raid support for root raid
3. Create Raid Arrays and Move system (Boot First, Root Second)
4. Reboot
Now in step 2 I get a (kernel panic VFS cannot mount root), yet ext3 support
and the PDC20269 DRIVERS are built INTO the kernel? Modprobe is puking and I'm
seriously considering using a more automated installation that supports raid.
Unless of course I'm missing something after reading the outdated docs? Is
there a way to load the raid modules in expert mode in Unstable installation?
I'm not worried about CPU power (it's a dual proc system). And I've partitioned
up the raid as needed with the following devices:
Drive/part raid dev
hde1 hdg1 hdi1 hdk1 /dev/md0 (/boot/ raid1)
hde2 hdg2 hdi2 hdk2 swap ( striped) (hd*3 is a logical part)
hde4 hdg4 hdi4 hdk4 /dev/md1 (/ raid5)
hde5 hdg5 hdi5 hdk5 /dev/md2 (/usr raid5)
hde6 hdg6 hdi6 hdk6 /dev/md3 (/var raid5)
hde7 hdg7 hdi7 hdk7 /dev/md4 (/home raid5)
hde8 hdg8 hdi8 hdk8 /dev/md5 (/temp raid5)
hde9 hdg9 hdi9 hdk9 /dev/md6 (/opt raid5)
Now I'm comfortable with the md devices and raidtools2 package, i have no
issues setting up the arrays. I'm just frustrated that this feature is not
supported in the installer.
In fact I'm willing to sign on and help out but I'm warning all of you my C
skills leave a lot to be desired, or is this support bieng worked on now? I'm
using Sarge, SID is too new for even me.
Of course you see my goal is to have a system that can withstand a drive
failure and still be able to boot.
Currently hde1 and hde4 are acting as the stytem drives (/boot and /
respectively).
Now eventually I get the arrays up use raid re-conf to mirror /boot to hde1 and
add hde4 to the md device.
So as always any ideas, direction, comments? will be appricated.
Thaks again, I'm looking to have a howto up soo also.
Regards,
Hazen.
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