GRUB, booting, and SW RAID 1+0...

[Bill McGonigle]

On Feb 15, 2006, at 11:43, Paul Lussier wrote:

> Uptime and stability is far more important, so I thought I'd play
> around with the software RAID stuff again since it's been a while.  I
> was thinking of striping mirroring disks A & B and C & D, then
> striping across those two sets.

The kids these days are using LVM to stripe the two md devices.

If anyone can tell me how to convert a script(1) log into a 
human-readable text file (accounting for final rendering of escape 
sequences, backspaces over all my typos and the like) I can put up a 
log of the tutorial we did at DLSLUG a few months back on this.  I've 
tried the Perl VT100 emulation module but it got the best of me.

You can't boot off an LVM /boot without a lilo hack, but you can setup 
a small pair of /boot partitions and set them as a simple RAID-1 
mirror, and boot from them using GRUB.  Put the rest of that drive and 
the other drive in your RAID 10 stripe.

> Since there are only 2 controllers in this system, obviously
> performance will be heavily impacted by mirroring from the primary to
> the secondary on a single controller, but performance isn't an issue
> right now.

Why not put one slice from each mirror on each controller?  If you lose 
a controller you'll still have all your data, though with two degraded 
md devices.

-Bill
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