Posted by jamba on September 30, 2009
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Finally…I’ve gotten around to doing this. It has really taken a lot longer than it should have…but life is busy (I even went on vacation somewhere in there…AND stripped wallpaper/painted 2 rooms in the house. haha).
“Installing softRAID on Linux” is a more fitting title, at this point–being the Linux has been installed and working for quite a while, whereas the RAID has not.
I have changed my intended setup a few times during this journey, and have finally settled on leaving my /boot and /(root) partitions NON-raid, operating off of my /dev/sda drive. My home (which happens to be sda4) I have successfully converted to a dual disk raid 1 setup.
This document proved exceedingly helpful, I absolutely recommend it regardless of distribution. As everything was pretty much set up in my previous posts, all I did was add my entries to /etc/mdadm.conf using the command “mdadm -E –scan >> /etc/mdadm.conf” . After that, I did a rebuild of initcpio with this:
“[root ~]# mkinitcpio -g /boot/kernel26.img“. I also added my /dev/md2 into my fstab (along with the swap on the second drive).
With a reboot…everything worked magically. The only thing left for me to do was to reformat my single disk /home directory (sda4) to Linux raid auto detect (type “fd” using cfdisk), and then assemble the array. To do all this, I booted up from the Arch Linux live cd, changed the type of the partition, and then booted back into my normal setup. I was then able to run “mdadm -A /dev/md2 /dev/sda4” to add sda4 to the already running array md2. This started a rebuild of the array, syncing sda4 with sdb4. SUCCESS!
I am all done for now… maybe one day I’ll have the time to fiddle around with getting the root and boot partitions to work the same way…but until then, I am happy with what I’ve got. This was my end goal in the very beginning, anyway: to have a RAID backup for pictures and other important documents, which are stored in the /home directory.
Maybe someone will find this helpful, and save some time. It definitely did me good to take a break so I could observe some things I had done wrong (or incompletely).
Posted in linux | Tagged: linux, mdadm, raid | 1 Comment »
Posted by jamba on September 29, 2009
I’ve gotten back from vacation mentioned in the previous post…but I have STILL yet to even get on that computer I was working on.
We have been staying busy doing things around the house–stripping off wallpaper, painting, gettin tile, etc.
It is running currently as a single disk system, with a single disk RAId set up (but unused).
I haven’t forgotten about it, or anything like that. I will probably finish this sometime this week, whenever I have time. Or make time.
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Posted by jamba on September 10, 2009
Part 1
Part 2
I fiddled around with this for a while, and ALMOST had it working. However, on boot, my root RAID was not built, so boot would not continue. I’m pretty sure something is out of order somewhere in some setting, but as of yet I have not been able to figure this out.
So, I am still running on 1/2 of a RAID setup… on 64-bit Arch Linux, Loving it, as usual. Have gnome up and everything, and it went MUCH quicker this time, as I had done it previously (installing 32-bit version on my laptop). Actually, it went a lot smoother, since I knew what to expect, and when to do things and whatnot.
Anyhow, so I have half of this array going, and I believe what I am going to do is alter my design again, and enable/build the /home array and use that (which is the most important, and sole reason of doing this, anyway). Then figure out the / and /boot parts later on when I get a chance.
As for right now…I’m off for the beach. It will do me good to leave computers alone for a few days. It has so far, I haven’t done anything computer related all week! (been on vacation)
Have a good weekend, and I will continue (and hopefully/probably conclude) with part 4 when I return.
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Posted by jamba on September 4, 2009
This is a continuation of Part 1.
After fiddling with Ubuntu and my RAID setup for a while, I got to thinking. After every upgrade I would run into this same issue, and would have to re-do the array create/build/assembly process while making sure the kernel was placed properly, as well as the initramfs.
So… combining that realization with my positive experience with Arch Linux, I decided to give up on Ubuntu and proceed forward using Arch. I have had no problems thus far with running Arch on my laptop, but on my desktop I will be much more focused on stability, rather than latest-and-greatest. Luckily for me, they just annouced a kernel26-lts not very long ago–this is a kernel that will stay supported for a longer period of time with no major changes. I will also put Gnome and Xorg on hold so they will not update automatically. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in linux | Tagged: arch, linux, raid, softraid, software, ubuntu | 3 Comments »
Posted by jamba on September 3, 2009
So yesterday I got a couple of new HDD’s: WD black 640 GB 3.5″ drives, so I figured I would do something I had wanted to do for a while: give my primary desktop a RAID setup. I’ve gotten tired of backing up pictures and other important information (…but mostly pictures), and it would make my life easier to have a RAID1 array.
However, I do not have a hardware RAID, or anything of that nature. So after doing some searching, I came up with these links:
So, following along with the collective of what these articles were stating, I went to download the Ubuntu Alternate installer CD. This did not turn out very well, though. I downloaded it twice, and had the right md5sum. Burned it 3 times, and each time when I checked the disc for defects, the same file was always corrupted. How can this happen? I even tried two different burners.
Giving up on this, I went for the regular AMD64 Desktop installer. I figured I could boot to the live environment, and then do an apt-get update followed by an apt-get install mdadm.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in linux | Tagged: linux, softraid, ubuntu | 4 Comments »
Posted by jamba on September 2, 2009
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Posted by jamba on September 1, 2009
August 31, 2009
Best of Open Source Software Awards 2009
InfoWorld’s 2009 Bossies spotlight today’s Top 40 open source products for business and IT pros
By InfoWorld staff, Doug Dineley, James R. Borck, High Mobley | InfoWorld
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58 Recommendations
If you think you can easily whittle down the best open source software to a manageable number, you’ll soon discover that you can’t do it without a great deal of hair pulling, nail biting, and gnashing of teeth. There are just too many excellent tools. Even if you give up on a “manageable” number and go whole hog — say, a top 100, which is certainly doable — you’ll still face too many hard decisions and too many arguments. You’ll be looking for a way out.
To bring you this year’s 40 top open source products — our 2009 Bossie winners — we pulled a couple of fast ones. Our first inspired dodge was to come up with the InfoWorld Open Source Hall of Fame. There’s a certain number of obviously great open source solutions (we settled on 36) that deserve a hall of fame, and though our annual Bossies selection regularly passed over most of these because of their sheer obviousness, a few inevitably complicated the process. Erecting the hall of fame allowed us to honor these inconvenient legends — the Linuxes, BSDs, Sendmails, and Snorts — once and for all.
Rest here: Best of Open Source Software Awards 2009
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