On 12/20/05, Josh Trutwin <josh at trutwins.homeip.net> wrote: > > Questions: > > 1.) Does anyone have experiences they can share with setting up a s/w > RAID on an existing system? (Server is a Dell PowerEdge 1750 running > Debian sid with 2.4.32 - I build the kernel myself - it is currently > co-located which might make remote setup interesting) I practiced that on a remote server (well, it was in the basement, and I wasn't) since I was considering doing it to rented dedicated server. After a couple of tries, I could do it reliably, reboots and all. IIRC, the instructions I started with were these: http://www.issociate.de/board/post/25205/How_to_build_bootable_RAID_1_as_a_module_with_Grub_on_Debian_Sarge.html I partitioned differently which caused me a little heartburn (wrong argument to mkinitrd on my first tries.) Practice on a machine you can get to before doing it to a machine that is truly remote. 2.) We can have a maximum of 3 drives on the SCSI controller. I am > pushing to get two more drives matching the current drive. I was > going to use one as a scratch space / archive area and then use the > other to setup a software RAID. Sound ok or something better? I'm not a pro, so my advice may not be worth anything, but I setup a PowerEdge 1550 that way and it worked fine. > 3.) RAID-1 seems to be the right solution for this kind of setup (only > 2 disks, exact same size) I don't think you need identical drives, though that makes it easier. If they're different sizes, size the md device to the smallest drive. Any other suggestions / war stories are most welcome. Keep a cheatsheet of mdadm commands around. Mine have worked and worked with *almost* no problems, but when something goes wrong, you want to minimize how long it takes you to relearn what you need to know to fix it. Steve -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20051220/d2ece093/attachment.htm