Alvin Oga wrote: > ... >>A quick question: are there *any* Debian derivatives that support RAID 1 >>/ and /boot? > > > normally ... raid1 supports / and /boot raid off the shelf > ( built in the default kernel.org kernel ) I know - that is why i was very disappointed to find that it wasn't supported even in the latest Sarge snapshot (i honestly expected it to be supported in Woody as well). > - it all assumes that /boot is in / and "/" is less than 1024 > cylinders ( 520MB or so for "/" ) It appears that this is not a limitation in the latest installer (from what i can tell). Having a separate /boot seems to be supported from the reading and testing i've done. > - if not, you will need a custom initrd ... that supports raid > and /boot and / can be anywhere on the disks crossing the 1024 > cylinder boundries and however big you want I know. I tried to do this, but Debian's mkinitrd is not giving me the joy the Red Hat one did (see below). > in my own itty bitty world of machines .. > - creating /boot is a bad idea .. Why? I can't see a reason for not making it. It then allows you to put / on more exotic filesystems, or even on a volume manager (i haven't done the former, but the majority of my machines use LVM). > - creating / bigger than 128MB or 256MB is a bad idea ... Again, why? My preferred setup for a workstation is *everything* in /. This is the preferred arrangement for new users according to the Sarge installer, as well. It saves a lot of stuffing around with partitioning. > ... > - bad idea because i dont want to fiddle with it once > it's deployed and if it breaks i want to fix in minimal > time and not have to wait and wait and wait and wait What exactly do you think is a bad idea? RAID 1 for / and /boot has been an extremely trouble-free setup for me on all of my servers (around 20 of them), and has saved me from machines crashing when hard drives go bad (especially the ones that don't even know they're going bad ;-). > you can always build a custom initrd instead and all the drives > would be happy .. I've tried that - i must be missing something. Below is what i posted on debian-boot, and got no replies. (I'm trying to install to 2 x 200 Gb WD2000JD-00GBB0 SATA drives.) -- Snip -- 4. Install latest Sarge snapshot to standard ATA drive. Set up RAID devices (md0 = 1 Gb /boot, md1 = 4 Gb swap, md2 = 195 Gb /), rsync ATA partition to SATA partitions, chroot to target partitions and run LILO. This last method seems to be on the verge of working, but when i boot from the /boot partition, it can't mount md2 on /. I can boot from the SATA /boot and use the ATA /. It seems the md devices aren't started, and i can't work out how to include them in the initrd. On RH, you could just specify preload modules on the mkinitrd command line, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. I added raid1 and md to /etc/mkinitrd/modules, but that doesn't help. Any suggestions? -- Snip -- On RH, i use this to set up the initrd for my ITE8212F hardware RAID controller (which i'm trying to get away from): mkinitrd --preload sr_mod --preload iteraid /boot/initrd-2.4.20-30.9 2.4.20-30.9 The way to do the same thing on Debian's mkinitrd seems to be to add the desired modules to /etc/mkinitrd/modules, but that doesn't seem to do the right thing. Do i perhaps need MODULES=dep in /etc/mkinitrd/mkinitrd.conf? > ( manually do what the fancy rh installer is doing that > deb installer is not - to assemble the raid array before installing or > booting ) Assembling the RAID array before installing is not what the new installer choked on. It created and mounted the partitions just fine. It just gives a warning that the way i set it up is not supported, fails to install both GRUB and LILO (i tried both), and fails to boot after installation. -- Paul <http://paulgear.webhop.net> -- Everyone who voted for slavery was free. Everyone who votes for abortion was born. That's how oppression works. -- Matt Evans, Harvard Law Student
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