Raid 1 + lilo
I. Forbes
As a follow-up to the "closest to debian" thread.
I am using software raid 1, + IDE drives.
On a woody system with the latest lilo and a new bios it seems
pretty good. The bios will boot off the 2nd drive if the first one fails.
Both disks have an MBR and lilo is on both disks via a mirrored
/boot partition.
I think this is pretty bullet proof and it handled everything I could
simulate but I have not tried shooting out one of the drives!
Now I am looking for 2 things:
1) has anybody got a 'deb' of the latest lilo, back-ported onto
potato. I am looking for one to use on my "stable" machines?
2) has anybody written a nifty script which can be run by crond to
read /proc/mdstat and send off e-mail if something is not
healthy. I know this can't be too tricky, but any contributions
to save "re-inventing" the wheel would be appreciated.
Also on my wish list is a more advanced script which is run on boot-
up which:
- detects that one drive in the raid1 is not synced - and is
presumably a new disk which has just been installed to replace a
dead one.
- reads /etc/raidtab, the partition table on both disks and
probably a dedicated configuration file.
- partitions the 'new' disk if required.
- hot syncs the new partition(s) into the raid device(s).
- runs 'mkswap' and 'swapon' to set up swap partitions on the new
drive.
- runs install-mbr and lilo to make the new disk bootable.
This should all be done vary carefully with lots of checks so as not to
wipe valid data! Maybe the script should be run manually with
warning prompts.
Thanks
Ian
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Russell Coker
> 1) has anybody got a 'deb' of the latest lilo, back-ported onto
> potato. I am looking for one to use on my "stable" machines?
> 2) has anybody written a nifty script which can be run by crond to
> read /proc/mdstat and send off e-mail if something is not
> healthy. I know this can't be too tricky, but any contributions
> to save "re-inventing" the wheel would be appreciated.
I think that there's a package in woody for that, I can't seem to find it at
the moment though.
--
http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/projects.html Projects I am working on
http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page
I. Forbes
On 30 Jan 2002, at 9:08, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Jan 2002 22:43, I. Forbes wrote:
> > 1) has anybody got a 'deb' of the latest lilo, back-ported onto
> > potato. I am looking for one to use on my "stable" machines?
>
> http://www.coker.com.au/lilo/
Thanks very much. It almost looks like you put this together in
response to my request.
> > 2) has anybody written a nifty script which can be run by crond to
> > read /proc/mdstat and send off e-mail if something is not
> > healthy. I know this can't be too tricky, but any contributions
> > to save "re-inventing" the wheel would be appreciated.
>
> I think that there's a package in woody for that, I can't seem to find it at
> the moment though.
I see there is mdctl, as well as mdutils, raidtools2, and raidtools
available in woody. All seem to have overlapping functionality and
only one of them can be installed at a time.
mdctl seems very new and appears to have a "monitoring" function.
Up to now I have been using raidtools2, this is available in potato
and woody. I am cautious to use mdctl as it is very new,
documentation is a little sparse and it is not available on potato but
in the long run I guess this will be the preferred utility.
Has anybody had any experience with these tools?
Russell Coker
> > > > > 1) has anybody got a 'deb' of the latest lilo, back-ported onto
> > > > > potato. I am looking for one to use on my "stable" machines?
> > > >
> > > > http://www.coker.com.au/lilo/
> > >
> > > Thanks very much. It almost looks like you put this together in
> > > response to my request.
> >
>
> There is a small bug with this package. When I try and install it I get
> a problem with conflicting manpage versions. The lilo-doc package
> installed without problems.
>
> nimbus2:~/debs# dpkg -i lilo_22.1-6potato1_i386.deb
> dpkg: regarding lilo_22.1-6potato1_i386.deb containing lilo:
> lilo conflicts with manpages (<< 1.29-3)
> manpages (version 1.29-2) is installed.
> dpkg: error processing lilo_22.1-6potato1_i386.deb (--install):
> conflicting packages - not installing lilo
> Errors were encountered while processing:
> lilo_22.1-6potato1_i386.deb
>
> The manpages package installed is the latest "stable" version.
Sorry I forgot about that. Use --force-conflicts and --force-overwrite, it's
probably not worth releasing a new package just for this.
Or you could just install the manpages package from woody.
--
http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/projects.html Projects I am working on
http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page
Peter Billson
handle the failure of a drive on reboot. While at LinuxWorld I asked the
Intel team how their controller would handle it.
The answer was that the card would note the disk failure, notify you
of the problem, rebuild the array once you replaced the bad drive and
then the system would boot. Of course if you had a hot swap on line the
rebuild would be automatic.
It sounds like, for high availability with no hot swap, that software
RAID with LILO on both drives could be a better choice. Your system
would come back, although crippled, faster and be running while
rebuilding the array.
Seems from the discussions there is no "right" answer to which is
better. A lot of factors weigh in such as availability of a hot swap,
cost, availability vs. data integrity, etc.
Pete
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