On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 11:05 AM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
I was thrown a cheap OEM-server with a 120 GB SSD and 10 x 4 TB
SATA-disks for the data-backup to build a backup server. It's built around an Asus Z87-A
that seems to have problems with anything Linux unfortunately.
Anyway, BackupPC is my preferred backup-solution, so I went ahead to
install another favourite, CentOS 6.4 - and failed.
The raid controller is a Highpoint RocketRAID 2740 and its driver is
suggested to be prior to starting Anaconda by way of "ctrl-alt-f2", at which point
Anaconda freezes.
I've come so far as installing Fedora 19 and having it see all the
hard-drives, but it refuses to create any partition bigger than approx. 16 TB with ext4.
I've never had to deal with this big raid-arrays before and am a bit
stumped.
Any hints as to where to start reading up, as well as hints on how to
proceed (another motherboard, ditto raidcontroller?), would be greatly appreciated.
Several. First, see if you CentOS supports that card. The alternative is to go to Highpoint's website, and look for the driver. You *might* need to get the source and build it - I had to do that a few months ago, on an old 2260 (I think it is) card, and had to hack the source -they're *not* good about updates. If you're lucky, they'll have a current driver or source.
Second, on our HBR's (that's a technical term - Honkin' Big RAIDS... <g>), we use ext4, and RAID 6. Also, for about two years, I keep finding things that say that although ext4 supports gigantic filesystems, the tools aren't there yet. The upshot is that I make several volumes and partition them into 14TB-16TB filesystems.
BackupPC pools data with hardlinks so you have to put its entire archive in one filesystem. However, unless you know for certain that you'll need the entire space for backuppc I'd recommend breaking the space up into sizes that your RAM will handle for an XFS fsck. As much as I like backuppc, there are some things it doesn't handle well (VM images, huge databases or single-file mailboxes with daily changes, etc.) and you might use the other portions for ad-hoc copies of things like that.
Besides, if you have a problem with a truly humongous RAID, the rebuild will finish sometime around next summer....
Yes, I'd probably use a RAID10 style RAID so it runs at full speed even with a drive out of the array so you can put off the rebuild until a weekend. A rebuild will keep the heads too busy to do a lot of other work while it is running.