[CentOS] Re: Anaconda doesn't support raid10

Tue May 8 00:06:15 UTC 2007
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

Ruslan Sivak wrote:

>> 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.

I typically use 36 Gig scsi's for the system.  You can use that or even 
less for the first 3 partitions where you install, then add a 4th 
partition on the same pair of drives.

>> 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.

You are living very dangereously there.  RAID can protect you from one 
of the more likely failures, but nowhere near all of them - and some 
will kill all the data in the box in one step.

> 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

I'd toss two of the drives in some desktop linux box and run backuppc on 
it - and get an external drive to periodically make an offsite copy.  If 
your data compresses well you could use drives about half the size for 
backuppc.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com