Linux and Raid???

[smp]

Hi all .. maybe you've noticed my other thread, but I'm looking to set up a new home/web server on a KT133a or AMD 761 based board. I was wondering if the onboard promise and high point controllers that some of these boards feature would work under Debian .. because I would like to mirror two drives for redundancies sake .. I'm looking at getting an A7V133 w/ raid if I can ... please let me know. Thanks.

-love SMP

 

[Nosferatu]

I tried Linux on my A7V133 and was unsuccessful. I was trying mandrake 8.2
However it does support Redhat and a couple more
Promise

Select fastrak 100

I believe that is what the version is on the A7V133 raid........

Hope this helps.........

 

[Nothinman]

Just use the Linux software RAID, those IDE RAID controllers aren't real hardware RAID anyway.

 

[smp]

Just use the Linux software RAID, those IDE RAID controllers aren't real hardware RAID anyway.
Oh yeah? So I don't even need onboard raid? That solves a lot .. thanks

er... how do I use software raid w/ Debian? Would you know Nothinman?

 

[Nothinman]

Are you running potato or woody?

 

[smp]

I'll be running woody.

 

[Nothinman]

1) Install raidtools2
2) look in /usr/share/doc/raidtools2 =)

There will be the HOWTO and example configs that you can copy to /etc/raidtab and edit for your device names. Just make sure you have the proper modules available for the kernel (md and raid1).

mkraid /dev/md0
mkfs.xfs /dev/md0 (I'm a big proponent of XFS, although ext3 would be cool too, I would just avoid ext2 or reiserfs)
cat /proc/mdstat to see mirroring progress.
You can use it while it's mirroring, it'll just slow down the sync.

 

[smp]

Thanks a lot!

 

[marat]

why don't you like reiserfs? Any bad luck?

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< why don't you like reiserfs? Any bad luck? >>



The specs change frequently. Seemed like a hack everytime I read about it. Im almost anti-journaling, so dont take my word for it

Also XFS has proven itself time and time again on another dinosaur, IRIX. If its good enough for moderately powerful, to almost supercomputer style systems, its good for my POS linux machine

 

[Nothinman]

why don't you like reiserfs? Any bad luck?

No, actually it ran fine the whole time I used it. But after watching Hans and his team on the mailing lists they leave me uneasy. reiserfs 3.5 -> 3.6 had an on-disk format change, reiserfs 4.0 is almost a total rewrite, the userspace tools are terrible, etc. If it ever gets finished it seems like it might be the standard replacement for inode based filesystems, but for now it's very far from being finished.

I now use XFS and it has a much more polished feel to it, the Linux patches have the same on-disk format as IRIX, actually SGI maintains them both from the same internal tree. The userspace tools are very high quality (since they're just ports of the IRIX tools), ACL support, journaling to a seperate device support, architecture independent (where as reiserfs was x86 only for a while because of endian issues), etc.

 

[Armitage]

<< No, actually it ran fine the whole time I used it. But after watching Hans and his team on the mailing lists they leave me uneasy. >>



Glad I'm not the only one that feels that way.
I did have some substantial stability problems when I tried ReiserFS about a year ago. It turned out to be a large series of bugs in ReiserFS, but (IIRC) the ReiserFS team vehemently denied there was a problem until somebody else showed up with the fixes. The issue was with the "tail" option that controls how RFS stores small files directly in the btree instead of a reference to the file.

 

[marat]

I have reiserfs (-notail option for / partition as recommended) on all my partitons and I run 2.4.18 kernel. Works fine (great?), but you guys left me worried. Perhaps I should do more research and do some heavy tests.