Re: [SLUG] Booting from software RAID 1

From: Larry Brown (larry.brown@dimensionnetworks.com)
Date: Wed Jun 16 2004 - 08:46:09 EDT


Have you looked into creating a script that assigns a swap file to a
file on the mirror after the machine has booted and remove it on
shutdown? If that is possible, it would work around the problem. I
would think you would take a pretty good performance hit though. I
didn't know that a problem disk where the swap file is would cause a
failure to boot. But it does make sense.

You might want to remove the swap file from fstab and simply mount it
with your own script after a successful boot. Have a shutdown sequence
that places a tag file that the script looks for when mounting the
swap. If the script fails to find the tag file (meaning it was an
unexpected shutdown) it could simply not mount the swap and send an
alert to your cell etc. If it does find the tag file it mounts the swap
and removes the tag file. That way the server can still be running
until you can arrive to take the necessary steps to verify the swap was
not to blame etc.

Just some thoughts...

Larry

On Tue, 2004-06-15 at 21:21, Ken Elliott wrote:
> I usually set my Windows servers for RAID 1 (mirroring) on the boot disk.
> But it seems Linux won't let me do this. Perhaps I'm doing it wrong, but
> I've found no docs on this.
>
> Here's what seems to work:
> Set /boot on it's own partition, and set RAID 1 on /, /usr and /home, etc.
> Both disks have swap partitions, but if I crash either disk, the loss of
> swap will kill the box. So, to get the real benefits, I must be able to
> mirror Swap, or do without it (not good). If the loss of a disk crashes the
> server, I might as well skip mirroring and setup a cron job to copy changed
> files ever so often...
>
> I did find a site where a fellow put together a lengthy process involving
> more drives and a lot of work. But it was written 4 years ago for kernel
> 2.2. I'm on 2.6.
>
> Oh, yeah... The "hardware" RAID in the Intel 865 chipset is software
> dependent - not true HW RAID.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Ken Elliott
>
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