[Cialug] linux software raid

[Nathan C. Smith]

I don't much care for software RAID.  Any room left in the budget for a
3WARE card?  They do a great job of supporting RAID with Linux.

That said, I have a box with software RAID (similar situation to yours, and
no time to acquire a 3ware card) that is running FC2 with software RAID.  I
think too I set the /boot volume up as part of the RAID.

I had an NT4 machine with software raid - a section on one of the drives
started going bad and it was part of the boot partition on drive 0 -  not a
part of the RAID set.  It caused it to not be possible to break the RAID set
like I was supposed to be able to through software.  I ended up doing a
disaster recovery-style operation on the machine and resolved never to have
"partial redundancy" like software RAID and no redundant boot sector again.
Hard lesson learned.

-Nate

-----Original Message-----
From: David Champion [mailto:dave@visionary.com] 
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 2:26 PM
To: cialug@cialug.org
Subject: [Cialug] linux software raid



Just fishing for some advice on linux software raid setups. I'm 
configuring a new Dell PowerEdge SC1425 with 2 80gb SATA drives, I want 
to put them in a RAID 1.

The "hardware" mode isn't supported under anything but Windows, A Dell 
rep in the Dell tech support forums says to use a Linux Software RAID 
driver.

I tried setting it up with Mandrake 10.1 (DiskDrake has a really nice 
interface for building the RAID) - but apparantly there's a bug 
somewhere that will let it load the first RAID volume MD0, but fails on 
subsequent volumes - in my case I also have MD1 and MD2. I have the mdk 
10.2 beta 2 to try - if that doesn't do it, I'll try Debian (have Ubuntu 
burned to a CD).

Has anyone tried a software RAID with Ubuntu? Is it supported "out of 
the box" or does it require futzing around with the kernel? DW suggests 
trying Fedora... I'm just not so keen on RH - especially their software 
updater.

I spent some time reading up on things over the weekend on how I should 
be setting up my volumes. Some say you should put your /boot partition 
on a plain linux-native (or journaled) partitions outside of the RAID. 
Others say it's fine to make it a RAID volume. I'm tempted to make it 
part of the RAID - seems to me that if your boot kernel supports the 
RAID, it should be fine.

-dc

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