Josh Trutwin wrote: > A while back one of the servers I help out with that a buddy of mine > owns had a catastrophic hard drive failure. It wasn't a HUGE deal > because we were slowly migrating off to a new server, but there still > was some data loss. > > The newer server we're migrating to which I am more active in managing > does not currently have redundant drives. I do a lot of off-site > backup of important data, but I'm still very nervous about this > situation and trying to push the owner to spend some money on more > hardware. There isn't a hardware RAID controller so I am suggesting > to the owner of the server to purchase a couple more disks so I can > setup a software RAID solution as I've been reading up on here: > > http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html > > Questions: > > 1.) Does anyone have experiences they can share with setting up a s/w > RAID on an existing system? (Server is a Dell PowerEdge 1750 running > Debian sid with 2.4.32 - I build the kernel myself - it is currently > co-located which might make remote setup interesting) I've this multiple times with good sucess. The remote setup can be a little more touchy and you really need to watch your config process. A few things that you need to answer. How loaded is your backplane/scsi bus? How busy is your CPU? Although mirroring doesn't create much cpu load like a software lvl 5 would, it does create double the traffic on your bus's when writing. What enviroment are you in? What services are you running and what is your uptime demands. Then I can comment more. > > 2.) We can have a maximum of 3 drives on the SCSI controller. I am > pushing to get two more drives matching the current drive. I was > going to use one as a scratch space / archive area and then use the > other to setup a software RAID. Sound ok or something better? > > 3.) RAID-1 seems to be the right solution for this kind of setup (only > 2 disks, exact same size) > > Any other suggestions / war stories are most welcome. > > Thanks, > > Josh > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >