[CentOS] Re: Anaconda doesn't support raid10

[Ruslan Sivak]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Ruslan Sivak wrote:
>
>> I'm not looking for total reliability.  I am building a low budget 
>> file/backup server.  I would like it to be fairly reliable with good 
>> performance.  Basically if 1 drive fails, I would like to still be up 
>> and running, even if it requires slight reconfigurations (ie 
>> recreating the swap partition).
>
> I like to keep things simple-minded and not fight with anadconda. 
> During the install, put /boot, swap, and / on your first 2 drives as 
> RAID1.  After that works the way you want, build whatever layout you 
> want with the rest of your space and either move your /home contents 
> and mount point over or mount it somewhere else.  A nice feature of 
> this approach is that you can upgrade to pretty much any other 
> version/distro     by building a new set of system disks and swapping 
> them in, keeping your data intact.  I also like to use disks in 
> swappable carriers and to keep a spare chassis around.  That way you 
> can use it for testing things and developing your next version but if 
> your production motherboard fails you can just move the drives to it 
> and keep going.
>
I have 4 500GB drives.  Seems kind of a waste to put just /boot swap and 
/ on the first 2 drives. 
>> If 2 drives fail, I would like to still be able to be up and running 
>> assuming I wasn't unlucky enough to have 2 drives fail in the same 
>> mirror set.
>> If 3 drives fail, I'm pretty much SOL.
>> The most important thing is that I can easily survive a single disk 
>> failure.
>
> If you can deal with the space constraints of partitions that match 
> single disk sizes by mounting them in appropriate places it's hard to 
> beat RAID1.  If everything fries except one drive you can still 
> recover the data that was on it - plus it gives you natural boundaries 
> for backups which you shouldn't ignore just because you have raid.
>
Unfortunately this is my backup server, and also file server.  While I 
may move the file server part out to another box in the future, for now 
it's going to be serving two roles.  I would like to be able to depend 
on it. 

In the future I might set up a backup of this server to be on Amazon's 
S3.  Is there a linux program that interfaces with it? 

Russ