Nigel kendrick wrote:
Hope that's all clear. If anyone wants to comment on what I did I'd be happy to hear what you think and perhaps what I might have done differently!
Sounds like you did what you had to in order to get your client up and running again while under a bit of time pressure. Often times, we wind up with a suboptimal solution when faced with those circumstances, but doing things "the right way" isn't always the fastest way. 8-)
If it was me (and it isn't), I probably would have set up the 3 disks in a RAID5 array. That way, you can lose one disk and the system still hums along until you can replace the failed disk. The way you had things before, you could also lose one disk and continue humming along...just as long as it wasn't the system disk that failed. 8-) If your client has the budget, and you've got the time, you might want to consider building a new box with a 3Ware hardware RAID card and 4 disks. You can run a 3-disk RAID5 with one hot spare. So if you lose a disk in the array, it will grab the spare and automagically rebuild the array. In theory, that allows you to lose 2 of your 4 drives (as long as the 2nd doesn't go away while the rebuild is happening) without the system crashing and burning. Depending on what your space requirements are like, you could upgrade to 4 80gig SATA drives and something like a 3Ware 8506-4LP or 9500S-4LP for about $600 over the cost of a new system. CentOS 4.2 should install on a RAID5 array on either of these cards without any fuss.
Cheers,