Nigel kendrick wrote:
>Hope that's all clear. If anyone wants to comment on what I did I'd be happy
>to hear what you think and perhaps what I might have done differently!
>
>
>
Sounds like you did what you had to in order to get your client up and
running again while under a bit of time pressure. Often times, we wind
up with a suboptimal solution when faced with those circumstances, but
doing things "the right way" isn't always the fastest way. 8-)
If it was me (and it isn't), I probably would have set up the 3 disks in
a RAID5 array. That way, you can lose one disk and the system still
hums along until you can replace the failed disk. The way you had
things before, you could also lose one disk and continue humming
along...just as long as it wasn't the system disk that failed. 8-) If
your client has the budget, and you've got the time, you might want to
consider building a new box with a 3Ware hardware RAID card and 4
disks. You can run a 3-disk RAID5 with one hot spare. So if you lose a
disk in the array, it will grab the spare and automagically rebuild the
array. In theory, that allows you to lose 2 of your 4 drives (as long
as the 2nd doesn't go away while the rebuild is happening) without the
system crashing and burning. Depending on what your space requirements
are like, you could upgrade to 4 80gig SATA drives and something like a
3Ware 8506-4LP or 9500S-4LP for about $600 over the cost of a new
system. CentOS 4.2 should install on a RAID5 array on either of these
cards without any fuss.
Cheers,
