I've just finished installing a new Bacula storeage server. Prior to doing the install I did some research and ended up deciding to do the following config.
6x4TB drives /boot/efi efi_fs sda1 /boot/efi_copy efi_fs sdb1 /boot xfs RAID1 sda2 sdb2 VG RAID6 all drives containing SWAP / /home /var/bacula
Questions:
- The big problem with this is that it is dependant on sda for booting.
I did find an aritcle on how to set up boot loading on multiple HDD's, including cloning /boot/efi but I now can't find it. Does anyone know of a similar article?
I also spent (wasted?) quite some time on this issue because I couldn't believe things don't work so nice with EFI as they did before. The designers of EFI obviously forgot that some people might want to boot from software RAID in a redundant way.
I ended up with a similar design than you, my fstab has this: /dev/md0 /boot xfs defaults 0 0 /dev/nvme0n1p1 /boot/efi vfat umask=0077,shortname=winnt 0 0 /dev/nvme1n1p1 /boot/efi.backup vfat umask=0077,shortname=winnt 0 0
Then in my package update tool I have a hook which syncs like this:
EFISRC="/boot/efi" EFIDEST="${EFISRC}.backup"
efisync() { if [ -d "${EFISRC}/EFI" -a -d "${EFIDEST}/EFI" ]; then rsync --archive --delete --verbose "${EFISRC}/EFI" "${EFIDEST}/" fi }
BTW, another method could be to put /boot/efi on RAID1 with metadata version 1.0 but that doesn't seem to be reliable, it works for some systems but fails on others according to report I read.
- is putting SWAP in a RAID a good idea? Will it help, will it cause
problems?
No problem at all and I don't want to lose a swap device if a disk fails. So it's the correct way to put in on RAID, IMHO.
Regards, Simon