This post is going to be somewhat of a “link dump” for me of some pages that I’ve been perusing lately. After playing with RT (request tracker) – I added a few ticket items for the home network. Now, if you’ve been a longtime reader and sorted through ALL of these posts here you’ll know that I’ve made use of software raid on the home systems. Why? Linux software raid seems fairly reliable (so far – 2 years +). It doesn’t depend on a specific piece of hardware. In short IF the worst happens and the array fails I should be able to retrieve data from an individual drive more easily than if it were hardware raid. I’m using Raid Level 1 (cloning/mirroring) and ext3 is the filesystem on top. I’ve had some slight problems with one drive in both the Desktop and server arrays and both arrays had been degraded for some time. My goal was ultimately redundancy and to eliminate the disruption that hard drive failures have given over the last few years.
Tag: software raid
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Ubuntu Linux Software Raid – Replacing a Failing Drive
Sometime back I setup my home server running Ubuntu Linux (6.06 – Dapper Drake LTS). I used two pairs of drives to do raid cloning. Two IDE drives were for the main system structure and two SATA drives for Audio/Video storage as well as CDimages and other large file sharing on the local network. Well… I noticed the hard drive light was on solid and sure enough one of the two SATA drives had failed. (I didn’t get my status email because I’d done a network structure change and didn’t update my local mail setup…) Anyway… replacing it was a pain in the neck only for the physical access to the box. Everything else worked as it should.
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Software raid fun…. device detection order
Anyone that’s setup software raid on a system with multiple storage adapters has probably run into this kind of issue, but I thought I’d mention it. Last weekend I built a machine to replace my server (the server was to be captured into a VM). The main system was going to be installed onto dual IDE drives, the VM partition and other data on dual 400GB SATA drives. Well, install went well after getting past some of the irq issues I mentioned in a previous writeup. md0 was /boot and so on…. (md0 residing on the dual ide drives.) When the system went to reboot though it didn’t get very far. It complained of not finding a boot image (I think that was the message – didn’t make a note.)
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Linux software raid notes
Here are a few other notes on linux software raid. I created a directory called raidinfo to keep information in to make it easy to maintain the raid array. First… from the software raid howto, I’ve done the following….
sfdisk -d /dev/hda > /raidinfo/partitions.hda
sfdisk -d /dev/hde > /raidinfo/partitions.hdeSo…. I’ve now got a good snapshot of the partitioning data. When I hooked up an external usb drive to add to the array, all I needed to do is this…
sfdisk /dev/sda < /raidinfo/partitions.hda (more…)
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Firewire/USB card and ethernet incompatibilities on Ubuntu 6.06
I’ve had a machine for quite a while that I’ve been working on as a “backup server”. My goal with it is to have a RAID1 setup with two 250GB drives and I also wanted USB2/firewire functionality so that I could even add a USB drive to the array for the purpose of having a hot-swapped spare drive that could be taken offsite. Well, the biggest frustration I’ve had has not been with software raid, or any of the rest of the software setup, but that something about the firewire/usb card didn’t like the built in ethernet. I FINALLY got things working… let me document what I went through.
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More linux software raid fun
OK, I know there are probably quite a few looking at this thinking…. “Hello where has he been?” when I’m talking about playing around with software raid under ubuntu linux, but…. in spite of all I’ve done supporting desktop systems and even small business servers I’ve never had an opportunity to setup a raid array. First it was because “you don’t want to do software raid” and I didn’t have a card to support hardware raid, then when I first was seeing people raving about how good linux software raid is, I didn’t have two free drives of equal size to work with. Well, the other day in working towards a storage system for a client I’ve got an ubuntu system (dapper 6.06.1) setup with software raid and wanted to poke and prod and test some things out before it goes into a useful role.
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Software raid under linux (Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake)
First, I should disclaim that this is going to be a brain dump of the resources and experience of a quick setup of Ubuntu 6.06 on a software raid based storage system. This may be less than ideal, but is doable and seems relatively solid as a system. First off, what is RAID (redundant array of independant/(*inexpensive) disks) So, several cheap hard drives put together in an “interesting” way. Now, increasing storage size isn’t something I’m too interested in, after all there are myriad other ways of expanding storage in a linux system (not to mention huge drives getting cheaper by the day.) My goal here is redundancy, I want to be able to lose a drive and still have the data, so RAID1 is what I’m setting up. We won’t get sidetracked into the other types.